


Fire and Brimstone

by corbyinoz



Series: Hamartia [2]
Category: Thunderbirds
Genre: Action/Adventure, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-03-17 16:19:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 44,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18968818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corbyinoz/pseuds/corbyinoz
Summary: Part 2 of the Hamartia series.International Rescue, a volcano, and the ongoing fallout from their disastrous first meeting with the woman who calls herself H.A. Martia.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> So - a long time after the first part, finally we are moving on with this story. This cannot stand alone; it follows directly from the first part, Bo Kata, and will be even more strange if you don't know what happened there. My sincere apologies for the delay in getting on with this one, but the muse just wasn't with me.  
> Amazing how inspiring a thoroughly good new TAG episode can be!  
> Thanks as always to the unfailingly generous Soleil_Lumiere.

Prelude  
Three weeks ago

_The night before the events of the last chapter of Bo Kata part 1_

Scott Tracey was no stranger to disciplinary hearings. They didn’t happen often; he was always too much of a straight arrow accepter of hierarchy to front his commanding officer’s desk much. But every now and then the other overriding facet of his character, the one that valued justice over orders, meant that the blunt hammer of military discipline collided with his own sense of what was right. He knew the scalding nature of such interviews. He’d long accepted them as the collateral offered in his bargain with military life.

Meeting Admiral Pang and Colonel Casey in such an adversarial way was both challenging and ever so slightly humiliating. It was a long time since he’d worn a uniform that consisted of something beyond his own choosing, and now he came in nothing more impressive than tailored civvies. His armour as he stood before each, consecutively and in different continents, was a fundamental sense that he had trodden a moral path. He remained acutely aware that morality as such was a sidebar notion for much of the military judicial system.

Pang was hard to read, and yet, Scott felt they understood each other. There was a desert dry humour to the admiral that recognised absurdity as part of the human condition, and so when Scott stood before him and explained, once again, the imperatives that had driven his behaviour in tracking and reclaiming Thunderbird Two, Pang nodded, only once, to share recognition of the absolute quandary Scott had found himself in. Pang had the integrity to follow through when Scott met him after the loss of the First Responder team. He gave brief but comprehensive approval for International Rescue to continue, with the proviso that they were on probation, as far as WASP command was concerned. Scott expected no less, feared worse, and so left San Diego with a measure of satisfaction, even as Pang’s eviscerating description of Scott’s choices on Nazca plain still tore his guts as he headed for Geneva.

Colonel Casey was a different matter altogether. Their shared history, including the time of the feared loss of two of his brothers, meant that he cared rather more deeply about what she thought of him. Her disappointment in his lack of control aboard the WASP vessel Tiger Shark was clear, and it met an equal disappointment in himself. And yet, even as she levelled her stare at him and expressed her disapproval, his own mind was clear. Gordon was being tortured. Gordon was an innocent. Gordon had required protection. And as big brother _nonpareil_ , Scott had brought deliverance in spades. If the political and personal aspects of Colonel Casey’s scorn were discomfiting, in his heart Scott was secure. 

He would do it again, and never regret it. So Colonel Casey’s thorough and complete demolishing of his decision process, while saddening, did not touch his core conception of what had gone down. He could live with withholding information; he could live with her professional admonishments. He did what he had to do to get his people home, and the decisions that kept him awake at night – and oh, there were some doozys – had nothing whatever to do with keeping in sweet with the GDF, and even with Colonel Casey, no matter how highly he regarded her.

In the end, her judgement had been the same as Pang’s; International Rescue was on probation, and would remain so for the foreseeable future.

“And while this madwoman is on the loose,” she had added, with an asperity born of sensing Scott’s resistance to her disapproval, “I want you to let me know any and everything you find out. She’s targeted you, Scott. She knows too much about you. The GDF is fully prepared to activate a search and detain operation worldwide, but we need intel. So I need you to promise me you’ll be proactive in sending me the slightest hint you have about her whereabouts.”

Her whereabouts. _Her_. It always came down to her. The First Responder criminals were a team, sure, but the woman loomed large as the one who was the instigator and director and sheer unmatched intelligence of this horrendous dyad.

It was a tough 24 hours. Scott didn’t make it back to Tracy Island until almost 2200, but even so, he was surprised to find only Virgil in the living area.

Virgil was seated in the pit, his legs supported by pillows on the central table. Also ensconced there was a large and half eaten cake.

He gave Scott a weary salute.

“You’re back.”

Scott dropped into the opposite seat with a sigh.

“I am.”

“And not arrested. Or flagellated.”

“Oh, there was flagellating. Multiple bouts. You just can’t see it because my shirt is absorbent.”

“Hmm.” Virgil nodded towards the cake. “Gordon made it. Carrot with cream cheese topping. Of all the surprising things on this planet, the fact that Gordon is actually not a bad cook is one of the more bizarre.”

“What’s the occasion?” Scott leant forward and cut himself a large hunk of cake before getting back up and heading for their father’s desk. “Does carrot cake go with bourbon?”

“Carrot cake goes with anything. Or bourbon goes with anything. I forget which?”

“Want one?” Scott picked up the bottle and waggled it invitingly. “A different kind of medicine.”

“Sure.” Virgil waved a hand. “Celebrations due. You were not hung, drawn and quartered.”

“I agree. So how come it’s just the two of us?”

“Ah. Well. That’s probably on account of the fact that even though International Rescue has been cleared to resume operations, we’re beat to hell.”

“Yeah.” Scott considered pouring two glasses at his father’s desk, but instead hooked the bottle around his fingers and took the glasses with him back to the pit. “Here.” He handed Virgil a glass, and waited until he took it before filling it to the brim. “To being back in the game. With provisos.”

“Provisos?”

“Probation.”

“Ah.”

“So.” Scott took a long draught of the bourbon, felt its cool heat roll down his throat into the belly that had never quite settled since his decision on Nazca. “Care to fill me in our current status? How’s Brains doing with the recommissioning?”

“About what you’d expect. He’s completely re-routed the internal systems on all our birds. Still a lot to do, of course. I think he’s working 25 hours a day, would extend that to 30 if it was in any way possible to bend the space time continuum. You need to tell him to take a break before he does. Break, I mean.”

“Will do. That’s good news, though. Okay, so Brains is being Brains and doing the work of five people. Next on the agenda - how come Gordon and Alan are in bed by ten o’clock?”

“Gordon’s got a headache. You know, he’s so easy to read. He just gets more and more still. Not like he’s usually still. And then he starts to realise it, and so he starts trying to – I guess, move for the sake of moving? Only it looks wrong, and his face goes all tight, and then finally he says he’s going to his room to do stuff, which translated means he’s going to bed way too early for cool points.”

“Yeah.” He knew how loose Gordon usually was; catlike, his body splayed across the furniture, one minute all action, the next complete shutdown. Scott had never gotten close to that kind of off switch mechanism. He’d envied Gordon, even sometimes resented him for it. Now he missed it acutely, as he watched his younger brother struggle through deafness and headaches and vertigo.

“Alan?”

“Hmm. Alan. Aiming for normal. Stretched too tight.”

Virgil wasn’t always the most forthcoming of his brothers, but whatever he said had purpose and power. ‘Stretched too tight’ from Virgil meant his kid brother was only barely handling any of what had happened. Their loss of agency; the existential threat to their lives and their organisation. Sometimes it was easy to forget that Alan was still in high school when he dealt with problems and dangers so far beyond that usually encountered by his peers. Alan was strong and smart and willing, but the sinews that surrounded the rest of his family’s hearts were not yet fully formed. Those tight bindings that kept his older brothers and Kayo and Grandma from letting their hearts fall through their floors were not yet in place. If Scott occasionally wished they never would be – because he knew each of those sinews was won with trauma faced and overcome but not forgotten – he also knew that Alan would never be content outside of IR. He was a child of a family that asked extraordinary things of each member, and the unvarnished truth was that Alan was always going to grow to become an integral part of everything they were.

“Anything I should do?”

Virgil took a sip of bourbon, then shook his head.

“I think he’ll be okay. Gordon is insisting on a day at the rock pools sometime in the next few days. Maybe tomorrow? Says he has to get out of the air-conditioning, or something. I think it’s a good idea.”

“Yeah?” Scott matched Virgil’s sip, although truth be told, his was the deeper one. “Yeah. Sounds good. Penelope?”

“When Gordon left, so did she. Penelope’s kinda doing it tough alongside Gordie.”

“I never think of Lady Penelope doing anything ‘tough’.”

At that, Virgil sent him one of his most arch eyebrows.

“You don’t think it’s tough to watch someone you care about go through all that?”

Scott lifted his glass, saw it was almost empty, and filled it again.

“I take your point. Kayo?”

“Kayo. Kayo has what she thinks is a lead.”

Scott tilted his head, tiredly. “You’re not impressed?”

“I don’t know.” A sigh, as weary as Scott’s bones. “Kayo - of all of us, she’s the one struggling the most with what happened.”

That was not what Scott expected to hear. “Come on, Virgil. Of all of us, she’s the most professional.”

“And she just got her ass professionally handed to her. Scott. Come on. _Professionally_ , Kayo’s job is to protect us.”

Wincing, Scott put his head back on the seat. “Yeah. Right. Should have seen that.”

Virgil let that sit for a minute. The lights were low enough in their room that the South Pacific stars could glitter a rococo ceiling for them, and Scott let his eyes drift there for precious seconds.

“She thinks there might be something in Sao Paulo. There’s – I don’t know. Brains can fill you in. Kayo’s downstairs with him right now, figuring it out.”

“You don’t think it’s anything?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe. John can’t say if it’s a weather anomaly or some kind of air disturbance like the one we caught on Nazca. I just think she’s…”

“Desperate?”

A small exhale of breath, replaced with another sip of bourbon.

“Not yet. We’re not desperate.”

“Not desperate. Just…?”

Ha.” Virgil grimaced. “Decommissioned. Discombobulated. Not quite destabilised.”

“Not quite.” Scott closed his eyes, shutting out the beauty, focusing on the void. “What do we need?”

“The million dollar question.” Virgil leaned forward and put his drink on the table where their communication hologram was conspicuously silent, an absence that felt both wrong and blessedly right, for now. “Time. I guess. Gordon and Kayo need to heal up.”

“You need to heal up,” said Scott sternly, and Virgil shrugged a tired acknowledgement.

“Yeah, I do. But we’re all getting there. It’s just time.”

“Time.” Scott swallowed his drink, then pulled himself to his feet. “And some poolside R and R.” He hesitated, then reached out a hand. It was both gratifying and worrying that Virgil took it, to help him rise from his seat. Virgil accepting help was rare enough that it told Scott more than anything that had been said tonight.

“Oh, by the way. When I was in Geneva I went and found Dr Barczak. Nerve specialist. Best in Europe, apparently. Or so Colonel Casey told me. She gave me some of these.” From his trouser pocket he pulled a small packet of pills. “Thought they might be useful.”

Virgil took them from him, glanced at them, and nodded.

“So Colonel Casey was not so mad she wasn’t up for some medical recommendations?”

“Ah, she loves us. Can’t help herself.”

That brought a short snort from his brother, and Scott was glad to hear it.

“Go on. Bed and pills. Tomorrow, we’ll relax and realise that this is all behind us.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Only thing to worry about tomorrow is sunburn. And Gordon’s unfiltered mouth.”

They both began to move together towards the stairs that led to their bedrooms, but gradually Virgil slowed. He didn’t face Scott, his frown landing somewhere near the kitchen, but Scott waited with him as his brother balanced his thoughts to find the words he needed.

“Do you – “ Virgil cleared his throat. “Do you think we’re really done with her?”

“I do.” More conviction than accuracy, but Scott was never one to shy from the occasional use of positivity in place of precision. “We were beaten, but it was never a fight we were equipped to take on. No shame in simply surviving. In fact, that makes it a huge win in my book. So now, we move on. Rest. Heal. Go back to doing what we do best.”

Virgil’s expression didn’t change, but at last, he nodded.

“Avoiding Grandma’s cooking.”

Scott dared a gentle squeeze on shoulders that were still tender from the damage incurred on that dreadful flight.

“Amen, little brother. Amen to that.”


	2. We have a situation?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A complicated call out.  
> And Emily Dickinson.

It wasn’t homework, per se. Homework as a concept was the essential characteristic of his schooling, and learning about physics was always kind of exciting, even if he wasn’t as big of a nerd about it as John or Virgil. Alan didn’t really mind schoolwork, if it led to rocketry and flight and even more awesome rescues. But poetry? Seriously, old poetry, not even cool new stuff like Gandaki or Miro. No, this was old, cobwebby, boring ass poetry that Scott and Kayo had both just up and disappeared for five days to avoid.

And Gordon was beyond being no help.

“You’re like – negative energy help. Like the black hole of help. You’re where help goes to die and be crushed into dark particles of despair.”

Gordon just grinned at him.

“Shit, Al, that was almost poetic. Maybe it’s rubbing off on you.”

“I’d like to rub o – “ At the last second Alan saw the trap and scowled.

His brother looked even more pleased with himself.

“I’m sure you would, but the rest of us frown on that sort of thing. Sicko.”

“Sicko? Have you read this?” Alan flopped into a lounge seat, then threw the book over his face. “Emily Dickinson was a sicko. God, she needed a _life_.”

“Emily? Sounds kinda sexy. Gimme a look.”

“Here.” Dramatically, Alan held the book out full length, dropping it into Gordon’s hands as his brother came to sit beside him.

“Hmmm. What’s kinky little Em up to now? ‘I heard a fly buzz when I died.’ Ookay. Um, what’s this one… ‘Because I could not stop for death- ‘ Wow. Our Em’s just a whole bunch of good times.”

“Right?” Alan waved a hand that expressed horror and resignation above his head. “And I gotta write a paper on this.”

“Emily Dickinson: when death’s just too good for you.”

“Emily Dickinson: killing me softly.”

“Go talk to Virgil.” Gordon dropped the book back on Alan’s midriff, eliciting an _oof_. “He loves this shit.”

“What do I love?” inquired Virgil mildly, coming downstairs and walking into the living area.

Gordon waved carelessly.

“This shit.”

“Is that so?” Virgil’s face and voice were still calm, but from where he lay Alan saw the planned assault, just in the way Virgil was angling towards them. “Is that really what I love?”

“Oh, yeah. Poetry up the - hey!” At the last second the shadow of Virgil’s advance must have betrayed him, because Gordon dived forward off the couch even as Virgil’s swipe cut through the air where Gordon’s head had just been. Alan reached up reflexively to grab Virgil’s arm, and the sudden tug pulled Virgil off the edge and down into the pit to land on top of Gordon.

“Thunderbird Five to Base, I’ve got – ohhh, really?” John’s avatar appeared above the central table, and Alan watched as his eyes took in Gordon on the floor, laughing, Virgil sprawled face down on top of him and Alan cackling. The face palm that followed was one of John’s best. “I will be so glad when Scott gets back. You’ve all regressed.”

“Hey John.” Virgil twisted his head up to look at his brother from the floor. “You got something for us?”

“I’ve got something for International Rescue, but since I’ve called in to a kindergarten – “

“Hold on. Let me go, Gordon,” Virgil hissed, as he disentangled himself and finally managed to get to a seat. He cleared his throat. “Go ahead, Thunderbird Five.”

“Thanks, Virgil. Guys, I’ve got an odd one here.” John, looking deeply tired but somehow still alert, swung around so that he could wave towards the floating globe behind him. Nobody commented on the fact he was supposed to be sleeping, and Alan wouldn’t dream of saying out loud how much better he felt when he saw John there, steady as ever. “I received a distress call about ten minutes ago from someone on the coast just below Maly Semyachik, in Kamchatka, Russia. She said that the volcano was going to erupt, and that for some reason – not very clear on this – they couldn’t get out via the road. Might be blocked. Sounded very frightened, so I said I’d get help to her. Standard procedure, contacted Moscow for an update on local efforts to evacuate the people, and got a complete snowballing from the emergency services there. Went upstairs, far as Dad’s contacts could take me, and same story. As far as they’re concerned, the area is uninhabited and there is no one in need of help.”

“What do your scanners tell you?” Virgil leant forward, frowning.

“That there is massive seismic activity and every indication that something big is going to happen very soon.”

“Ah, volcanoes. Mother Earth’s little acne problem.” Gordon climbed up onto the seat beside Alan.

Alan snickered. “You think she’s about to pop a zit, John?”

“A big one,” John confirmed. “So the next thing I did was contact the local government centre, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.”

“Try saying that five times in a hurry,” Gordon muttered to Alan.

“They assured me no one lives in that area since the eruptions of 2027. But I am getting a low-res satellite feed showing at least fifty people gathered around what could be the foreshore on the lava plain, and more seem to be coming as I watch.”

“That doesn’t make sense.” Virgil’s frown grew deeper. “Why would the authorities say no one lived there? Were they camping or something?”

“They also tried to tell me that their instruments were saying that Maly Semyachik was not erupting, which is ridiculous because I can actually see the haze on the satellite feed. But the Kyoto seismic centre is confirming.”

“Uh – John?”

“Yes, Alan?”

“You said it was a woman calling.”

Instantly a kind of stillness entered the room. Alan couldn’t look at anyone beside him, and he couldn’t quite meet John’s eyes, either.

“You’re asking if this is a trap of some kind?” John’s eyebrows rose.

“Not a bad question,” said Virgil, evenly. “Kind of hinky situation that she might exploit.”

“Okay. But guys - if we’re going to query a call every time it’s a woman’s voice on the line, we may as well hang up our entire operation. No, Alan, I don’t think it was Hamartia. Didn’t sound like her, wasn’t on the frequency she used last time. Very thick Russian accent.”

“Not one aspect of which she couldn’t fake.” Virgil’s tone stayed mild, but Alan watched as his fists slowly began to close. “And you gotta admit, the fact that the Russians are saying nothing’s there is a red flag on its own.”

Gordon shrugged. “I’m with John. We can’t go around tiptoe-ing every time it’s a woman calling for help. And anyway, why would she want to trap us? What would she have to gain?”

“Since we don’t really know why she did what she did in the first place,” and all mildness was gone from Virgil now, “I guess we better assume the worst.”

“Or the best. Exactly the same level of accuracy, only you don’t give yourself a brain hernia along the way.”

The fooling was gone, now. Both his brothers in the room with him were sharpening their edges. Both of them had suffered at the hands of the woman who had signed off as ‘H.A. Martia’, and it was predictable in a way that both would react so characteristically; Virgil increasing his levels of precaution, Gordon doubling down on optimism or bust.

Alan tried for brightness. “Well, I guess the one thing we know for sure is that there’s definitely a volcano erupting.” 

“Exactly.” John nodded his approval. “Let’s work with what we know.”

Virgil folded his arms across his chest. “I’m never happy when we’ve got an ambiguous situation like this. You think we should get some off the record info from our London agent?”

Alan kicked Gordon’s ankle. Gordon, scowling, kicked him back harder.

“Calling as we speak.” John looked down at his controls mere seconds before the image of Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward appeared above the table centred in the conversation pit.

“International Rescue! What an unexpected pleasure. What can I do for you this evening?”

Alan noted how her eyes scanned everyone present, with deliberate politeness, before returning to linger on Gordon. He turned to make a comment, but Gordon’s posture was so rigid, and his eyes so steadfastly fixed just above Lady Penelope’s face, that he took pity on him and subsided, ammunition in store for later. His brother’s pathetic attempts to keep the burgeoning relationship between him and Penelope at some level of secret cool was always hilarious.

“We’ve got a tricky one, Lady Penelope,” John said. “Sensors telling me we’ve got major seismic activity in Kamchatka, and we’ve got a distress call for help, but neither Moscow nor local government sources are confirming that a rescue is required.”

“International Rescue doesn’t go where it’s not wanted,” Virgil added, “but there are definitely people there, Lady P, and there’s definitely a strong possibility of an eruption.”

“Any chance you could ask someone in the know exactly why a government would ignore its own people’s calls for help?” Alan could hear the anger underneath Gordon’s voice. He wondered if Lady Penelope could, too. Gordon had a thing about authority at the best of times – until he joined WASP, authority was merely the base point for negotiations about how he’d behave – but authorities that abused their privilege and abandoned their responsibility? Alan could find it in him to almost feel sorry for Moscow.

“Hmm. I do have a lovely friend in St Petersburg. I haven’t had a nice chat for a while.” Lady Penelope spoke directly towards Gordon, almost soothing. Oh hell yeah, she hears he’s pissed, thought Alan. “Give me ten minutes, boys.”

“Can you make it five?” John looked worried as he kept glancing at readings only he could see. “This is moving along too fast for my liking. I’m monitoring the mountain’s size, and it’s starting to bulge out at a worrying rate.”

“Of course.” Without a goodbye, Lady Penelope’s avatar disappeared. Genteel and elegant she may be, but she knew the meaning of hustle when it was needed.

“What does the GDF say?” Virgil was cracking his knuckles, a sure sign that this one didn’t sit right with him.

“GDF won’t have anything to say,” Gordon predicted. “If the local authorities and Moscow are saying nothing’s happening, then officially, there’s nothing to comment on.”

“The Smithsonian Global Volcano Project have gone to high alert. Maly Semyachik is a decades volcano.” Alan was fascinated by volcanoes. He even had the bicarb soda and plaster of Paris mock-up from fifth grade to prove it, still gathering dust under his bed. The chance to flaunt his vulcanology could not be passed up. “That’s a volcano that the authorities reckon is going to be very active in this generation.”

There was a silence Alan hoped was an impressed one. 

After a moment, Virgil broke it, a twinkle in his eyes. “If I had a gold star I’d give it to you, Al.”

“If the geek factor wasn’t just about suffocating me, I’d give you a high five.” Gordon choked himself to illustrate the concept.

Several agonisingly slow minutes passed before Lady Penelope’s avatar reappeared abruptly.

“I have some information for you that might explain the situation. It took a little longer than I hoped because my friend had to make a call to her friend in PK. John, I know you are on a strict time limit here, but I really think you need to know the background to all this in order to make an informed decision.”

“Background, schmackground,” Alan said. “Are people in danger? Yes. Have they called for help? Yes. Come on, guys, what more do we need?”

“We need to know we’re not flying into a hornet’s nest.” Virgil gave him his version of a stink-eye, which paled in comparison to Scott’s or Dad’s, but still rated highly on the international scale of big brother smack-downs.

“Which is exactly what I suspect you will be doing. John?”

“Go ahead, Lady Penelope. Just make it the condensed version where possible.”

“Of course.” Lady Penelope inclined her head slightly. “You’re all very aware of the Bereznik Emergency of three years ago. You may not be quite so aware of the uprising that occurred in May last year. The success the Berezniki had in separating from Russia inspired others to try to overthrow the ruling Putin family. Kirill Putin managed to put this rebellion down thoroughly before word of it even got out to the World Council. My friend tells me over a thousand people were incarcerated or executed, mostly intellectuals, journalists, academics – people who had no business attempting anything quite so dramatic.”

“How does this relate to our Kamchatka situation?” Virgil’s patience was coming to the fore here, Alan could tell. He could also tell, by Gordon’s fidgeting, that it wasn’t a trait universally shared.

“My friend tells me that over one hundred people disappeared, just slipped away from Putin’s special anti-insurrection task-force. She tells me that these people you are tracking at the moment are likely to be what Putin termed ‘Mayflies’. It’s an allusion to the failed Decembrist rebellion of the nineteenth century of course, and also a reference to the brevity of the insect’s life.”

“So,” Gordon said, sitting forward, “the question is – if these people are the ‘Mayflies’, what would Moscow’s reaction be if we rescued them?”

Lady Penelope turned to him. “I’m afraid that’s unknown, Gordon. Kirill Putin has never acknowledged the uprising even occurred, so he’s not likely to bring attention to these people now. As well as that, he’s not likely to want them to leave the country to spread word of it elsewhere.”

“There’s nothing the World Council could do at this stage,” Virgil argued. “Would he really care?”

“Whoa.” John was frowning heavily at the data before him. “Guys, we need a decision now or there will be no point. These readings are not good.”

“Go,” said Gordon, firmly. “We can argue the details there, once we get these people out.”

“I agree,” said Alan. 

Virgil’s mouth twisted. He went to say something, stopped, then looked at Penelope.

“What do you think?”

Penelope didn’t frown, but there was something in her voice that told Alan she would have done if her sense of discipline had allowed it.

“I think there is quite a risk involved. President Kirill Putin is a ruthless man. He doesn’t like to be made to look foolish.”

“Can we get GDF approval?” 

“Working on that now,” John muttered, his hands flying over invisible controls.

“Okay.” Virgil drew a breath. “I guess, in the absence of Scott – “

“What absence?”

Scott stepped into the living area as casually as if he’d just been in the next room. Varying noises of surprised welcome greeted him. Only in Thunderbird Shadow could someone arrive and depart without letting the entire island know. “I’ve been listening in.”

“Scott. Come on, big brother. You don’t have to take the title quite so literally,” Virgil said. “Is Kayo with you?” 

“No.” Scott dropped into the nearest seat, next to Virgil. “She’s going to be doing some Kayo-style investigating for the next little while.”

“Did you find anything?” Alan asked, and then wished he hadn’t. A moment’s reflection told him what Scott’s body language was saying. He and Kayo had left in Thunderbird Shadow five days ago, checking out possible leads into the whereabouts of the woman now codenamed Hamartia who had challenged everything they thought they knew about their island and their operation. If they’d been successful, the yell would’ve echoed from the landing bay.

Virgil’s face had that funny little frown he wore when he had his medical brain engaged. 

“Are you fit to fly?”

A brief shake of the head told them all more about the depredations of the last five days than Scott would ever say directly.

“Cool.” His mind had leaped ahead, and Alan saw an opportunity. “I can take Thunderbird One.”

It was less a glare, more a raised eyebrow of ‘yeah, not gonna happen.’ Scott said simply, “No, you won’t be taking One.”

“Oh, come _oooon_ , Scott!” Alan was immediately furious. “You know as well as I do that I can fly your machine. Hell, I got better scores than you did when we simulated together. I am perfectly capable, I am beyond capable of flying Thunderbird One. We’re shorthanded and we need everyone we can get. Just because you’re too tired to fly, doesn’t mean - ”

His voice was muffled as Gordon reached around him and clapped a hand over his mouth.

“Slow down, Leroy, you’re gonna give your mouth a hernia, way you keep shootin’ it off.” The accent was pure hillbilly.

Throughout this, Scott kept raising his hand to buy a moment of quiet.

“Alan, you can’t fly One because Brains is still doing a complete systems overhaul. The stopgap stuff he did last month needs reassessment. I’ll ask him to do it for each of our ‘birds in due course.”

“Trying to get ahead of whatever this woman is using to spy on us?”

Scott nodded to Virgil. “Something like that. And I’m keeping it between me and Brains for now.”

There was a pause, a tiny recalibration, as another edge on the cogs that kept the family and the organisation working smoothly slipped just a little more out of sync.

No one needed to discuss why such heightened security was necessary. The violation of their agency, their privacy and their identity as a secure operation had affected each of them. But the fact of it burned like ice. Beyond humiliation and well beyond the fact of being beaten stirred a freshening gust of fear, blowing cold from a day only three weeks ago when the sun shone and the seagulls cried and someone they had every reason to hate told them just how vulnerable they really were.

“You hear that, snookums?” Gordon shook Alan with exaggerated care. “Nothing to do with snookums’ feelings, everything to do with snookums’ inability to fly a plane in pieces all over the landing bay. All better now?” Violently, Alan pushed his way free and Gordon collapsed smirking on the couch – until he remembered that Lady Penelope was watching and hurriedly straightened up again, face beginning to burn red.

Virgil rolled his eyes, the picture of restraint.

“Word from the GDF?”

“Gordon called it,” John said. “No rescue situation reported, no need for response or escort since we obviously won’t be going to a non-existent disaster.”

“Any unofficial comments?” Lady Penelope asked, her voice betraying her concern.

“That we need to play this very carefully.”

“Huh. Could have told them that for nothing.” Gordon crossed his arms. “Well? What’s the deal? We going or what?”

“It’s not up to me, of course, and I wouldn’t dream of interfering, but - I wish you wouldn’t,” Lady Penelope said. “I think this is a very delicate situation, and with all the best intentions in the world, I’m afraid good intentions don’t count for very much where Putin’s concerned.”

Alan looked to see how Gordon would respond to this, and wasn’t surprised to see his brother’s chin lift a little.

“John, there really is a hundred people there?”

“I’m using enhanced satellite feeds with the program EOS devised, but I can only give you an approximate head count. There’s a lot of interference. Latest and best guess - I have 153 there now.”

Gordon shook his head slightly. “Have to go.”

“I’m with Gordon.” Alan crossed his arms in unconscious emulation of the brother beside him. “John?”

“It’s a difficult situation, there’s no doubt, but I think we have to do it.”

“This isn’t that straightforward. Our systems are compromised.” Even Alan could hear the way Scott was fighting against himself, his innate need for action warring against the fact it would be launched from a shifting ground. “We’re light-handed without Kayo. No one at base. Only one plane. Dangerous political situation, and I agree with Virgil that we have to consider that this might be some kind of play by Hamartia.”

“What do you mean, no one at base?” Everyone turned to look as Grandma Tracy appeared, hands on hips, from the garden. “Last I looked I was perfectly capable of riding a desk.”

“You haven’t heard all the details of this one, Grandma,” Virgil began, but she stopped him with a look.

“I heard plenty. Way you bellow your business I could have heard it from the beach. You’ve got more than one hundred people who won’t survive today if you don’t go, am I right?”

“Maybe, but – “

“Don’t ‘maybe’ me, Virgil Tracy. Those people have been betrayed and abandoned by everyone who should have supported them, and I would hate to see the day that International Rescue started to make calls on what they did based on politics.”

Scott went to say something, then subsided instead. He gave a weary gesture of compliance.

On the other couch Virgil sat forward, hands clasped between his knees. “I guess that’s it. Gordon, Alan and me in Thunderbird Two, Grandma on base callout, John on Thunderbird Five. Scott, you know you’d be saying for us to go if you weren’t all kinds of beat,” he added, forestalling the argument he could see his brother beginning to make. 

“John – “

“I’m coming.”

“Come on, Scooter, be reasonable,” Virgil began, but Scott stood up.

“Mass evacuation event. We’re gonna need everyone we can get. And no, Virgil, you don’t get to play medical officer card, not this time. If we’re going, we better go now, and there’s no way in hell I’m staying behind while International Rescue flies into a shi – a storm.”

“Scott’s right,” said Grandma, briskly. “This isn’t going to be easy, but that’s when we’re at our best. Good luck, boys. Now off you go.”

“You heard her,” said Scott, now grinning at Virgil, who scowled but stood to join him.

Alan knew the decision had been made, and somehow he’d slid under the radar and was going, too. 

“Yess!”

“Dude.” Gordon sighed. “One hundred and fifty three people in danger, Al. Try for a little perspective.”

“Emily Dickinson homework, Gordon. _Rescuing_ one hundred and fifty three people, Gordon. Try for a little excitement in your middle aged life.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kirill Putin... well, playing in the future, there's always a chance that a certain Russian leader might establish a dynasty.  
> Also, this story completely stalled last year when a tragic volcanic eruption cost lives and made me question the morality of posting a fanfic centred around a volcanic eruption. After a long delay I finally decided to go ahead with it, and Mt Agung in Bali has erupted.  
> I'm not saying I should be stopped from ever posting fanfic again... but strewth, sometimes you wonder.


	3. The Count

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arriving at a decision is one thing; arriving at the rescue point adds a whole new complexity.

The trouble with riding in a plane that could circumnavigate the planet in two hours was that a trip of 8,597 kilometres gave you barely time to catch a doze. When what was actually needed was an eight hour crash in the bed of your choice, the inability to catnap loomed as something to complain about. Instead, Scott cricked his neck, easing some of the gathered tension of five days’ fruitless searching, sagged into the co-pilot’s seat, and listened as John described the environment they were heading into.

“The ground looked rather odd through the satellite feed. Almost – well, it sounds strange, but if I had to describe it I’d say it looked wrinkled.”

Gordon gave a theatrical groan.

 

“Great. We’re rescuing Russia’s ball-sack.”  
“I think it’s just the way previous lava flows have cooled. If the volcano erupted in sub-zero temperatures, it may have affected what happened as fire met ice.” John looked at Scott. “I haven’t been able to contact the people down there in the last ten minutes.”

“Understood.”

“I can’t get any more satellite images, the smoke cover’s come over too thick, and I’m reading a lot of silicate in the atmosphere. That could affect our usual comms. But EOS is boosting Two’s system. She thinks she can keep a connection established with Two. It’s our personal comms that might be interrupted.”

“Wait – you mean it’s already erupted?” said Gordon, clearly dismayed.

“Yeah, but not lava.” The comment was meant for John, but Scott heard the proprietorial tone in Alan’s voice as he jumped in to answer. The kid was going to ride his volcanic credentials into the ground. “That’s just gonna be smoke and ash. Maybe scoria. Each Thunderbird has a filter across their intake valves rated to withstand the finest particles of volcanic ash. We can still do this.”

“Volcanic smoke and ash means helmets at all times,” Virgil said. He worked the controls, easing Two down through a thick layer of cloud. “There might be all kinds of toxic fumes in that air.”

“And people are down there in it.”

“About that.” Scott dragged his energy up above the flat-line state it wanted and turned in his seat so that he was addressing everyone in the cockpit. “We all know that International Rescue is not suited to large scale evacuations, but in this case we’ve got no choice. John was picking up a hundred plus down there. Thunderbird Two can take 140 in the module, 170 if we use every bit of space in Two and really push it. We should be covered for numbers, but we’ve got to move fast. No luggage. No arguments. Just get people moving in and keep them coming.”

Gordon and Alan both nodded solemnly.

“Be prepared for panic,” John added. “You need to nip that in the bud as quick as you can. Panic’s always the enemy, I know, but we’re usually handling one or two people. When you’re working with large numbers, panic can be disastrous.”

“Gordon, you’re good at that.” Scott nodded at him. “I think we’ll use you as a one man flying squad; keep back, move in as and where you’re needed to calm things down, keep people moving. Alan – I want you with the stun gun.”

Alan made an involuntary movement, half-squirm, half squaring-up.

“I know it’s not what you’re used to, but – “

“Yeah, we used them that time, Al. Remember?” Gordon gave a smile that managed to not look as forced as it probably felt. “In Christchurch that time, with the riot after the earthquake when we needed to get in to that place on the hill.”

“I remember.” The memory didn’t appear to be a happy one, but Alan was nodding. “Those guns are pretty effective.”

“ _Safe_ and effective, Alan. You won’t be hurting anyone, just stunning them long enough to get them to safety. We’re not working in our own comfort zone here, but we’ve committed to this and we’re going to do it right. Virgil, I - “ Scott hesitated, but a single look at his brother told him Virgil already knew most of what he was going to say. “I need you ready to lift in a heartbeat. If things go wrong, if we get swamped or the situation with the eruption gets out of hand, I need you to lift clear with whoever’s on board. No exceptions made. Just get up and get out of there.”

Virgil cleared his throat. “Well, you say that Scott, but you can’t expect me to go if one of you is still down there.”

“No exceptions, Virgil. We’re not risking a hundred or more for the sake of one.”

“Yeah, I never did pass that subject on utilitarianism,” Virgil muttered, but when Scott raised his eyebrows, he received a reluctant nod.

John’s avatar reappeared, looking grim.

“I’m picking up a big spike in surface temperature, Two. We’re running out of time.”

“Then we better hurry. Take the handbrake off, Virge.”

“No need.” Scott gestured ahead, not bothering to look back at Gordon. “I think we’re there.”

A soft intake of breath from the two younger brothers behind him told him they’d caught sight of it, too. The last wispy layer of the cloud under-edge cleared and below them the sea was a charcoal blur. The sky itself was a deep grey colour, tinged with the kind of green that presaged snow, and visibility was poor. But even so, the pillar of ash, so thick and so large that it seemed to be solid, unmoving, filled the horizon in a way that drew every eye to it.

“We’ve got visual,” Scott said. “Plinian eruption. Maybe ten thousand metres high.”

John’s avatar nodded. “Copy that. Virgil, I know I don’t need to say it – “

“Yeah, I’m on it.” Virgil’s voice went even deeper, the way it did when things were about to get messy and he was digging in to get firm footing for the fight ahead. “We’re gonna make this as fast as we can.” 

Thunderbird Two’s speed slowed dramatically, and the blur beneath them began to be distinguishable as long, slow waves. Ahead was the outcrop of the Kamchatka peninsula, a dull coloured lump of land that ended in low cliffs dropping into the sea. The snow-covered volcano loomed in the near distance, perhaps twenty kilometres away, and to each side of the plain before them rose low hills. “Looking for a place to land now.”

This close they could understand John’s comment about wrinkles. The plain was scored in long, jagged slits, as if a bored god sitting atop the volcano had trailed giant talons through the earth to pass the time in some ancient game. 

“I don’t like the look of that,” Virgil muttered. Scott knew he was regarding the landscape as a potential landing site, impervious to all other minor considerations such as eruptions, and wondering about the stability of the alien-looking scene below them. “Gordon, you found me a piece of solid ground?”

Scott turned his head back slightly to watch Gordon bend over the ground-imaging equipment at his seat.

“On it – yes. Yeah, ahead, fifteen degrees east, that shelf on the cliff face. It’s part of the base rock.”

“Got it.” Virgil swung Thunderbird Two around as easily and lightly as if it were a leisure glider rather than a multi-tonne behemoth and set it down. Gordon’s shelf was a broad ledge some ten feet below the level of the valley floor, jutting out over the sea close to sixty feet beneath. Scott twitched an appreciative smile in his direction, then focused forward.

“But where is everybody? There’s - I see them!” Alan crowded in between Virgil and Scott, pointing. “Look!”

“Wow.” Gordon somehow managed to cram in there as well, staring ahead. “Where’d they come from?”

Now that they were landed on the lower shelf they could see that the surface of the landscape sheltered a seemingly endless series of four or five foot high runnels that lead back underneath the plain. Each one represented a lava run that had quickly frozen above and flown on below, gradually emptying out to create bubbles and holes right through the valley floor. Overhanging rock occasionally gave way to sky, creating the lines John had noted. From within what must have been a large system of naturally made tunnels emerged people; old, young, some with children, all clutching scarves or rugs held over their heads.

“Huh. It’s snowing,” said Gordon. “Is it snowing?”

“Not snow, ash. That’s ash.” Virgil glanced up as the forward facing windows of his ‘bird began to collect a soft layer of grey, even as they heard an irregular tock – tock – as if someone was throwing small pebbles at the windscreens.

Scott felt the surge of adrenaline firing in his belly, his chest, the faithful friend that had seen him through so many emergencies for so many years. It was almost effortless to stand.

Alright. The tension that had wrapped itself around and through Scott over the last few weeks flowed away, leaving nothing but resolution. This was what he did. This was who he was. Whatever hold that woman had on him, on them, it was meaningless here and now. There were people needing rescue, and he, and his brothers, had answered the call. 

“Gordon, Alan, with me. I want to be off this place in less than ten.” Scott tapped his comms. “John, do we still have you?”

“For the moment, Scott.”

Virgil reached to activate the hydraulic system that would lower the lift to take them to ground level, Alan scrambling to join the other two after collecting a stun gun and clicking it onto his belt. Scott and Gordon both grabbed packs that contained as much equipment as could be reasonably hefted by one person and still remain easily mobile. As the circular lift descended, the faces of the people below became more distinct, even in the flurrying ash and deepening haze. 

“Be ready, Al,” Scott murmured. “We do not want to get rushed until we can organise the evacuation.”

Even as Alan nodded, nervous but trying not to show it, Scott coolly and quickly assessed the people advancing towards the Thunderbird. A motley assortment of clothing, but fitted to the cold environment so no immediate concerns in terms of hypothermia. In the pale faces he saw worry, definitely, and fear, especially amongst those clutching small children, but no one ran towards them. In a handful of seconds Scott was suddenly sure with an instinct honed by combat and experience that these were a people who would not panic.

Outside of the shelter of Two the sound of the volcano was overwhelming. 

“Like a ginormous train,” Gordon said through the side of his mouth, smiling towards the gathering Russians as if this was a social call on a summery afternoon. “That’s not terrifying at all.”

The rumbling could be felt through their feet, into their spines. It sounded as though a thousand tons of rocks had been thrown into a blender, somewhere far too close by, and some demented deity was throwing more in every few seconds out of malice. A primal fear tapped at the base of his skull, and Scott pushed it down as efficiently as he’d always done.

Ten minutes, he thought, and then there was nothing in his head but getting this over.

He stepped towards the people who had come to a halt in unspoken agreement fifteen feet from the foremost prop of Thunderbird Two and raised a hand, along with his voice.  
“Hello. This is International Rescue. We’re here to evacuate you. Can anyone here speak English?”

From behind the largest group a hand came up, and a young man pushed his way forward. He wore a hard felt hat that looked like those worn in the Russian navy, pushed down onto thick brown curls. Something in the way he stood, hip-shot, relaxed even in this dire situation had the officer in Scott immediately flagging a mischief warning.

“Sure. Yes. I am Yuri. I can speak English.”

Scott’s shoulders dropped a half centimetre in relief. Having an interpreter on the ground always meant things moved far more swiftly than using EOS as an interpreter.

“Yuri, good to meet you. This is Gordon and Alan, and I’m Scott. We need to get your people off here as soon as possible. Are you all here?”

Yuri stared at him, a quizzical expression on his face. 

“Are _you_ all here?”

Scott frowned through the slow curtain of ash dropping between them.

“What do you mean?”

A head jerk towards the bulk of Two, looming above them.

“I do not think this- _zelenyi verbylud_ \- will carry us all.”

“You’d be surprised.” As Scott spoke, Virgil released the module, lowering it to the ground and opening it. The front that formed a ramp came down, revealing the module interior. Yuri swayed to look past Scott, then straightened again, the expression unchanged.

“How many?”

The volcano gave a deeper rumble, as if to hurry the conversation. 

“We can take up to one hundred and seventy.” 

Yuri said something softly under his breath, sounding a little like ‘ _pizdec_ ’. A man behind him ducked and swore as a larger piece of scoria hit his shoulder, and several people shrank back under the lee of the overhanging rock that had sheltered and hidden them for so long. Scott shifted impatiently.

“What kind of numbers do you have here?”

At that, Yuri gave him the kind of grin he’d seen all too often on the faces of pilots facing unwinnable odds, and Scott’s stomach tightened ahead of the bad news he knew was coming.

“We have two hundred and seventy three children, women, and men.”

Well, _shit_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning, there will be phonetically rendered Russian words throughout this story. As I have seen at least six versions of how to phonetically render the Russian word for 'please', much of the choices made in representing words in phonetic English (rather than using the Cyrillic alphabet, which I think is more frustrating for non-Russian readers) will be just based on how I would pronounce them - so to any and all Russian speakers out there, apologies in advance!  
> zelenyi verbylud - green camel  
> pizdec - fuck


	4. Galina's choice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> How do you make an impossible situation work?  
> By being a Tracy.

Work the problem. It was the only thing to do when everything blew up in your face like this. What can be done, when, and by whom.

“Alright,” Scott said. “Virgil? We’re going to need two trips.”

“Say again, Scott?”

“We have two hundred and seventy three people needing evac. Two trips.”

A world of meaning in the two seconds of silence that followed, then Virgil, steady as ever, confirmed.

“Okay, everyone. First we need people with respiratory problems, any asthmatics, and we need the very young, so families; mother, father, children. Everyone with children needs to get on board.”

A tall, gaunt woman holding a blanket above her head stood forward. Older than Yuri, and the look she gave Scott told him that she was an unofficial leader here.

“The ones who board will live, the others will be left behind. This is the situation.”

It wasn’t a question.

“No. We can transport the first group very quickly, and come back.”

The woman’s grim expression didn’t change.

“There is no time.”

“There is time, but we’re losing it.” 

“No. Those who stay, die.”

He tried his best smile, confident and reassuring. “I promise you, we will come back.”

Still, the people in front of him hesitated, even as the rumbling from the volcano grew louder and the ash pelted down, a silent snowstorm of grey.

Virgil’s voice came into his ear. “Scott, we need to get moving. As many as you can for now.”

He knew it, and every second gone was excruciating, but for whatever reason this crowd was not going to cooperate in their own survival. Urgently, he turned to Yuri.

“Can you convince them? We’re wasting time. We can do this, but we need to get people boarding.”

Yuri shrugged.

“I don’t think so. Maybe you be better leave.”

“Wha - ?” Helplessly, he turned to Gordon, who was scanning the crowd, lips tight. “Have you got any ideas?”

Gordon opened his mouth as if to say something, when someone called out from the rear, and Yuri translated. “We fought together, we die together.”

Oh. Of course.

These people had lost everything but their lives, and they’d done it for a principle. They’d found refuge here in as inhospitable a landscape as one could imagine, and the thought of abandoning their comrades in exile to this most horrific ending was anathema to them.

Scott lifted his eyes above the group, past the overhanging plain to where M-K continued to pour out its column of smoke. At the base of it he could see flashes of brilliant light that spasmodically illuminated the core. It was a hellish vision for a hellish situation, and his experience of other losing moments told him, chillingly and absolutely, that this was one he wasn’t going to win.

Maybe. But he hadn’t finished trying. And he wouldn’t give up.

“I understand what you’re saying. But isn’t it better to save some – save your children – than for all of you to be lost?”

A mother near him clutched her child, who looked no older than six, even tighter, but he saw no relenting in those eyes.

“We can be back here so fast you won’t have time to worry.”

“Why should they believe you?” Yuri said. “How do we know you are not sent here by Putin?”

“We’re not affiliated with any government.” A particularly large piece of rock dropped onto the ground beside him, bouncing through the inch of ash already there to stop, smoking, near his right foot. Somewhere a child whimpered. “We’re independent. A rescue organisation. This is what we do.”

“Scott, John’s getting some scary data up there.” Virgil was amazingly good at sounding both collected and concerned at the same time.

“I know, I know,” Scott said, the frustration and fear building in his gut. The woman kept her gaze on him, unwavering. He met her look; she was searching, too, and even more desperate than he was, but he felt the implacability of her will in her frost blue eyes.

Yuri gestured with his chin. “Maybe you go now.” In the crowd behind him there was an agonised little cry, but nothing more.

Scott opened his hands in appeal. “Please! If you know anything of International Rescue, you know we can be trusted. I promise you that –“

“I’ll stay.”

Gordon’s voice rang out over the hiss and crack of the volcano, the sharp patter of scoria hitting rock. Scott turned his head sharply to see Gordon standing with his hand raised, smiling widely. A murmur grew in the crowd, and as Yuri translated it grew louder.

“That’s my brother,” Gordon continued. “And my other brothers are flying the plane. They’ll come back for me.”

 _Brilliant_. Scott allowed a second’s worth of gratitude to his little brother before turning back to the people in front of him.

“I’ll stay, too. We’ll both stay and travel with the second group.”

Yuri looked surprised.

“You will stay here, with us? You will wait?”

“Absolutely.”

The woman stared at him, into him, for a moment longer. Then she nodded. Immediately the crowd seemed to break in half, part surging forward, part melting back into the tunnels.

Children, hitherto hidden and sheltered, suddenly began pushing forward, mothers and fathers gripping shoulders and hands. The deep, mortal fear in each of them was nakedly on their faces, now that the possibility of survival was so tantalisingly close. Gordon stepped forward and helped carry toddlers alongside their mothers, handing them over as they reached the module. Alan, standing by the ramp, waved them through.

“Everyone move to the back,” he called out, and Yuri translated, forcefully. A father carrying two small children stumbled on the ramp and Alan reached out to steady him, earning a muttered, “Prazhalsta.”

A tenuous relief, as the steady stream of families continued on into the module. Scott allowed his mind to move on to step two.

“Virgil, have we got somewhere nearby where we can put this first group?”

“I’ve got a cove, about one hundred klicks away.” A hundred kilometres in Two was a trip of perhaps twenty seconds.

“Sounds good. But I want as many as possible on this first run. Use the sickbay.”

“FAB. Cockpit?”

A hesitation, but Scott’s tactical experience made the decision for him.

“No. Situation’s too volatile. Keep the cockpit secure. And get them all off fast.”

Virgil’s tone was wry.

“You think I’m going to leave you two here? I heard what our crazy brother suggested.”

“Hey! Crazy brother is still on comms,” said Gordon. Scott heard Virgil’s chuckle.

“Don’t worry, Gordo, Alan and I will swoop back and save your ass, again.”

The flow of family groups and those most vulnerable to the effects of the ash had petered out. Alan called over from the ramp.

“We’ve got room for about fifty more in the module.”

Knowing who was actually in charge here, Scott turned to the woman.

“You heard that?”

She nodded, then called out to the crowd. A man answered back, clearly angry, but she responded sharply and Scott sensed the crowd’s acquiescence. This was undoubtedly a formidable leader beside him.

At first it was difficult to divine through the layers of blankets and ash just who had been summoned to safety, but gradually Scott realised the woman had called forward all the young adults. Some singly, some in pairs, all hurried past to the ramp, trying to shake off the ash collected in their shawls and blankets as they got into the shelter of the module.

“Must have been a tough decision,” he said to her. 

“Every decision is tough here,” she said, and he could well believe it. She lifted her head. “I am Galina Antonovna.”

“Galina. Thank you for your help. I promise you that we -”

“You will really stay?”

Scott saw it then, the tightness in the corners of her eyes, her mouth. Only for a second before she hid it in fierceness again, but he felt a rush of admiration for this woman controlling her own terror in order to lead her people.

He could relate.

“Yes. My kid brother has made a promise. I can’t help him break it.” He tried one of his more charming smiles, and was unsurprised when it met stony silence.

“I think that’s it,” Alan called. Scott checked the module and it looked like Alan was right.

“Any chance of squeezing in one or two more?”

Alan shook his head.

“We need room to allow the hydraulics to work.”

Scott nodded. “Alright. Galina, we can take as many as can fit on the lift.”

Galina stepped forward and called out again. In response, people began moving toward the lift directly underneath Thunderbird Two’s belly. This time, Scott could tell immediately who she’d identified; these were much older couples leaning on each other or actively being carried. Some held handkerchiefs to their faces, wheezing heavily through the cloying air. The ash made them appear ageless even as bowed shoulders and hesitant steps marked them otherwise.

“Securing the module, Alan,” Virgil said. “Make sure they’re clear.”

“FAB.” Alan hopped off the ramp, motioning for those inside to stay where they were, and reported, “We’re secured.”

The module ramp lifted to close the module tightly. As the last few inches closed, a few cries of anguished farewell rose up from those leaving friends behind, before the panel connected and their voices were sealed inside.

“Galina, will you go now?” He knew the answer before he even asked it, and she didn’t bother answering. But then he noticed Yuri, who certainly qualified as a young adult.

“Yuri! You should go.”

“Go?” He gave a devilish grin that inevitably reminded Scott of Gordon, and opened his arms wide. “You promised a second trip. I can wait. Besides, you need a good strong Russian to help.”


	5. No good

Gordon had the best aim of any of the Tracy boys. He was deadly with a gun, a dart, a snowball. Scott saw solutions where no one else could, and John was the indisputable intellectual, with a mind capable of the kind of comprehension well beyond anything the rest could muster. Alan’s balance was extraordinary – there was nothing he couldn’t hop up on top of and tame.

Virgil didn’t like to declare his greatest ability. It was too wishy-washy, too vague a thing to be quantified, but he knew he had it, nonetheless. He called it instinct. Grandpa called it his gut. Messages from something that felt both part of him and yet also from some outside source, some greater wisdom, and it was never something to be ignored. Whatever it was, it had been screaming at him from the moment John said, “It’s an odd one.”

Nothing about this felt right.

Looking through the scanner from the portside exterior camera, he could have been watching a scene from a hundred and fifty years ago. The ushanka caps, the babushka shawls, the huddled people beneath a sky-borne onslaught – it was a monotone landscape of refugees that could have represented Russian misery from a thousand scenes of dispossession and cruelty. He heard the brave resistance to rescue, he watched as the compassion embedded in Gordon’s bones came up with a solution, he waited as the solid mass of people shifted and broke and reformed into a stream that surged into Two and safety or stood back, heartbreaking in their acceptance.

And all the time, that voice, sure and insistent, kept telling him to grab his brothers and go.

He’d known something was wrong while he waited at sea level for Gordon to come back from the underwater lab, six weeks ago. He’d overridden his internal voice when he hauled in the two people who eventually kidnapped him and hijacked Two. And now, it was warring with the other compulsion that drove him whenever he saw need; the deep desire to help and protect that saw only the desperation and fear of the people below and urged action, whatever the cost to himself.

Even as he railed against their position, he almost unconsciously zoomed the scanner in on a boy of about six, dark eyed and solemn, who was standing back in the shadows of the lava tunnels. The push forward seemed to have left him behind. His small hands crept up under his chin, clasped together, and then Virgil watched as the child forced his hands back down by his side, a determined action meant to convey stoicism and courage.

The sight lanced his heart.

“Gordon, there’s a kid back in the tunnels, north-west of you, I think he’s alone. Can you see..?”

“Don’t have a visual, I’ll check it out.”

But even as Gordon replied, Virgil saw a tall woman come running through from underneath the plain’s surface, carrying a wrapped up bundle that suggested a baby, and grab the boy’s shoulder. Together the three made their way towards Two, and Virgil let out a sigh.

“It’s okay, Gordon, he’s been collected by Mama.”

“FAB, Two. You see any other strays from up there?”

“I’ll keep looking.”

Precious minutes ticked by. On the geophysical monitor, peaks of dark red showed where the volcano was building heat pressure like a balloon on the point of bursting.  
The stream towards Two slowed and then stopped. He heard Scott and Alan’s exchange, waited another excruciating few seconds until Alan called through, “All clear,” and then closed up the ramp and retracted the module, the sound almost lost beneath the rumbling of the erupting volcano less than twenty kilometres away. Another brief wait as Alan deposited people in the sick bay area directly beneath the cockpit, before rising up on the lift to join him.

It wasn’t only Alan, however, who appeared in the cockpit. A small but thickset man, grey with ash, ushanka gripped between his hands, appeared beside him on the lift. Before Virgil could say anything, Alan said, “Sorry, Virgil, he insisted and I thought time was more important.”

It wasn’t necessarily a bad decision. Despite the protocol that insisted on keeping the cockpit inviolate if the situation was an unclear one, Virgil understood the terrible imperative that made Alan’s choice – _we gotta get out of here and get back to Scott and Gordon!_ – and a protracted argument in a crowded space was not a great option. But even as he excused his little brother, he knew it was the wrong call. His gut was very insistent about that.

“We’re clear, Virgil,” Scott’s avatar said to him from above the console. “Make it fast.”

“FAB.” He fired the v-tol engines and lifted Two up and away, a wrenching sensation deep within him as he left while knowing that for all Alan’s and Scott’s recent statements nothing was clear, and that he’d left two brothers in real and present danger. Two felt the mass of 170 rescuees; he adjusted the trim as she slewed slightly from her uplift, calibrated as she was for weight distributed more centrally than spread across her interior.

Alan got the man seated in the place where Gordon had been minutes before, then dropped into the seat beside Virgil. He was holding it together well, but the quick glance showed Virgil the tension in his eyes, his mouth, the way his shoulders were slightly hunched. This wasn’t one of those exhilarating rescues, clean in and clear out, courage and fear spiking together to give a kind of instant high. This was muddied and equivocal and half done, and suddenly Virgil regretted bringing his youngest brother along on this particular mission. It had all the potential for complete tragedy building in the way it was playing out, and he wished, futilely, that Alan was not here to see it.

As if to reinforce that wish, Alan said, “It’s horrible out there, Virge. The ground, it’s just rumbling under your feet, and the ash. Kinda scary snow.”

Virgil didn’t answer as Thunderbird Two roared into forward flight towards the pre-set destination a hundred kilometres but only seconds away. This kind of quick hop was challenging in Two; to balance the forward thrust that would gain the maximum speed but to counter that with braking that would allow him to bring her down almost at once. Two was built for great speed and long distance. Middle ground was tricky.

He concentrated hard as Two surged and then almost stalled. He tried not to think of the stomachs of those crammed into the hold. The chosen site loomed below and he guided his ‘bird into a long glide that would bring her down and around to land, facing back the way he was already anxious to return. It was a piece of virtuoso flying he had no time to even register, let alone comment upon to Alan. He was lowering the landing props of his craft less than thirty seconds since he’d left Scott and Gordon stranded in a volcano’s path, and already his mind and body was entering the coordinates for the next flight.

The man behind him stirred.

“This – no good.”

“Hmm?”

“No good.” The man was standing, gesturing out of the widow at the largely featureless coast they had landed upon. “No good.”

Virgil activated the module descent before turning to look at the Russian.

“This is temporary. We’ll drop everyone here, pick up the others, then figure out a place we can take you all that will be…”

Even as he spoke, the man was shaking his head, vehement.

“This no good. Muskva – Putin – politizia, no good. Shmairt. This – death for us.”

“I know it’s not the best, but there’s no time. No time.” Virgil found himself gesturing in the direction they’d come from to match the man’s increasingly definite hand-waves. “We put you here, we come back, take you somewhere else.”

“No!” The man grabbed for Virgil’s shoulders, and Alan stood up, fists ready.

“Let go of him!”

“Easy, Al, take it easy.” Virgil stood too, dwarfing the desperate man, forcing his hands away. “You need to get out here. We’ll be back.”

“Thunderbird Two.” John from Thunderbird Five, looking concerned, and that was never good. “I have Russian military jets approaching fast, vector nine. Six of them.”

“What the hell..?” Virgil looked first at his screens and then out the forward window of Two. The snow clouds were even lower here, grey and thick, and the visibility was poor, but he could make out the formation speeding towards him, black dots that grew ominously in the viewport until he could recognise the distinctive KP-333 shape of the Russian airforce attack jets, made famous in the Bereznik campaign. “John, any idea what’s going on?”

“Sorry, Virgil, no. EOS hasn’t intercepted any communication between them, and there’s nothing on the waves from Moscow. She’s looking, but – wait, something’s coming in now. Putting through.”

“International Rescue.” A Russian accent, military in timbre. “This is Podpolkuvnik Rastorguyev, commanding squadron 876, currently at your position. Please explain your presence in Kamchatka.”

_Simple. We’re here rescuing political refugees from certain death, against the official advice of the GDF and your own government._

“Uh – this is International Rescue. We are… uh, we’re…” Virgil’s mind went blank. Nothing. Prevarication was never a strength, and the urgent refrain of hurry, hurry, hurry drowned out whatever capacity he had.

“International Rescue, I repeat. What is your purpose here?”

The Russian in the cockpit hissed, “We must go. Go!” 

Alan bent towards the console.

“We’re here on a training mission,” he said brightly to the leader of the six planes bristling in the air before him. “Nothing for you guys to worry about.”

There was a brief silence, then the voice of the lieutenant colonel came back.

“You will go now.”

“Oh, you know, we’re not doing anything wro– “

“There is no permission for to be here. You will go.”

“Alright, alright.” Virgil sat back down, readied the controls. “We’re leaving.”

The agitated Russian in the cockpit gave a long sigh and sat back down, too, muttering, “Bozhe moi.”

Virgil retracted the module and fired up the v-tols once again.

“Thunderbird Five, you get all that?”

“I did.”

“You got anywhere in mind?”

“Working on it.”

“We need somewhere close but safe.”

“I know.”

Thunderbird Two peeled away from the coast, leaving the KP-333s hanging in the air like malevolent wasps. With no particular direction in mind, Virgil followed his most basic need and headed south, back towards the erupting Maly-K, but kept her nose pointed a little to the east so that she would be standing off the Kamchatka landmass at almost two hundred kilometres, well beyond Russian national airspace. When Two reached a point directly out from where he most wanted to be, he held her there, hovering.

He knew John was the most efficient person to be looking for sanctuary; hell, John and EOS combined created the kind of administrative and search capacity unmatched by anything else on the planet. So he paid his brother the supreme compliment of not reminding him of the incredible need for a fast answer for almost three minutes.

Waiting was hard. This kind of waiting, excruciating.

“John, what about Alaska?”

John’s avatar appeared above the console, his head down then up, searching invisible databases. To his eternal credit, instead of snapping at him, he simply said, “Waiting on the Chief of Staff now.”

“Come _on_ ,” Alan said. He was shifting in his seat, unceasingly. “Virgil, we gotta go.”

“Where?” and this time asperity did come through. “Alan, we have no authorisation here. This is not sanctioned by anybody. We’re asking a government somewhere to take in people who might start up a diplomatic firestorm. It’s not that simple.”

“So – what. They’ll let people die? Just because of politics?” Alan’s disgust was palpable. “We’ve got a world council now, Virgil, that kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore.”

“I’m afraid it does,” said John, gravely. “It’s a no from the US.”

“Chief of Staff Gutierrez said no? He was a refugee himself, for crying out loud.”

John stared at him.

“Virgil, this isn’t getting anywhere near him. When I said I was waiting on the chief of staff, I meant I was waiting on Elena Makazidis in the Chief of Staff’s office, our agent. I’m contacting all our people, our agents, people Dad cultivated in governments. This is all under the radar. You know that.”

“Great.” He didn’t shout the word, but Virgil’s patience was almost extinguished. “Then give me an island somewhere.”

“We could take them home?”

Virgil shook his head. 

“No, Al, we can’t. It’s too far for starters, and if we did that and got found out that would be the end of International Rescue.”

“Why? We’re just saving people.”

“Because we operate under the augury of the GDF. We get to go where we get to go because they are guarantors of our neutrality. If they rescind that, we’re dead in the water. And they will rescind that, even Colonel Casey will rescind that, if the alternative is a war. We’re not immune, Alan, we’re not a special case.”

Alan slumped in his seat. “We should be.”

“Maybe. But we know we’re the good guys, we know why we do what we do. Others might not be so sure. We have to play by the world’s rules, or we don’t get to play at all.” In his mind, Virgil echoed the physical slump exhibited by Alan’s body. 

“It’s a no from Japan and China.” John’s voice remained steady, but the stress was there to hear for anyone who knew him as Virgil did.

Virgil’s right hand formed a fist on his thigh. 

“Are they sure? Couldn’t we find some remote corner somewhere?”

Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward appeared, eyes large with concern.

“International Rescue, I’ve been listening in and I may have a solution.”

“Go ahead, Lady Penelope, and fast.”

“John, I have a dear friend who married a lovely girl who happens to own an enviro-adventure camp on Umnak.”

John’s hands flew on his interface system, invisible to the occupants of Thunderbird Two.

“Umnak – in the Fox Islands. Approximately 1,875 kilometres from your current position, Virgil, almost exactly due east.”  
Penelope nodded.

“There are only 12 people living on Umnak now – including Adele and Igasiẋ. Adele said the Russians are welcome at Qaluun Camp.”

“But the US government won’t allow it,” John said. “It’s run by Alaska.”

“John, Umnak is so remote the chances of anyone finding out are virtually non-existent.”

Virgil didn’t hesitate. Thunderbird Two was swinging eastward even as John was hesitating.

“No time. It sounds possible, and that’s all I need right now. Lady Penelope, you are officially my hero. Thunderbird Five, if you can get precise coordinates from Penelope?”

Just under two thousand kilometres. Almost four thousand as a return trip. The Lockheed SR 75 Blackbird could make 6,788 kph. Thunderbird Two left that in its dust. Her fastest was 10, 078 kph, and Virgil would make damned sure she was hitting that all the way. Twelve minutes there, two to unload, twelve back.

Less than half an hour. They’d already lost ten minutes here on the coast. Scott and Gordon and a hundred Russians just had to hold on for another twenty-six. 

That wasn’t asking too much, was it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bozhe moi - my god  
> schmairt - death


	6. Ice cream rock

Standing slightly apart from the group of refugees now back beneath the overhang of the plain’s surface, Scott tried to ignore the time-sense he had developed over the years as first a pilot and then the point commander of International Rescue. His internal clock was a remarkably accurate one, and right now it was sending an urgent little pang of awareness coursing through his body as surely as if he’d tied an alarm clock to his wrist and that alarm clock was clanging the appointed time.

Virgil was late.

How long would it take to unload 170 passengers? International Rescue almost never engaged with large numbers, so his experience was limited, but he’d guess no more than three minutes, and probably something less given the circumstances.

It was seven minutes since Two lifted away, spilling accumulated ash from her windscreen and roof as she did. Seven minutes of feeling the ground beneath his feet shake as if it were a crunchy blancmange. Seven minutes of hearing the sound, as dreadful as any nightmare ogre could conjure, roaring and gnashing somewhere above his head and all too close. Seven minutes of watching scoria and ash pour down upon the rock shelf before him where Thunderbird Two should be, but wasn’t.

Gordon sidled towards him, studiously casual. He was a diver. His time sense was as good as Scott’s.

“Whaddya think?”

It was murmured in a mild tone, but Gordon’s eyes never left the ocean and there was something in them Scott ached to see.

_Really wish you weren’t here._

“A lot of people to unload.”

“Mmm.” Gordon’s lips tightened. From a distance, it would look more like a smile than a grimace. “Might have stopped by a drive through for burgers all round.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So.” His younger brother turned on his heel slightly, scooping ash and rock into a small pile against his boot. “Time for Plan B?”

“Might be.” 

“Do we have a Plan B?”

“Working on it.”

“Good to know.”

Scott tapped his comm again, uselessly. “Thunderbird Five, are you receiving me?”

The volcano’s continuous rumble and hiss was his only response. Without Two there to boost the signal, communications were down.

“Still not home?” 

“Looks like it.”

“I am gonna kick Virgil’s ass. Standing us up on a date like this.”

“And he’s usually so polite.”

A noisy sigh, then Gordon looked back under the overhang into the darkness of the many tunnels that riddled the plain.

“Any chance of sheltering in those, do you think?”

“Might be some that are almost completely enclosed, but – “

He didn’t need to finish. The way the land rose to the right of M-K as he looked at it meant that all the lahar from the volcano would flow straight through this area. It might be possible to find some kind of shielding from pyroclastic flow in a rock recess, if such a flow came, but the red-hot magma from the volcano’s core, and the boiling mud-water formed from melted snow and earth would search out every crevice and cranny.

Gordon nodded, fixed smile still in place.

“Are we screwed?”

“Not until I say we are.”

“Good to know,” Gordon repeated, his voice as neutral as before.

Scott peered through the increasing murk until he spotted Yuri. He waved him over, and the young Russian left a friend to trot to them.

“What can I do?” His accent sounded a little thicker – Scott knew stress could do that – so that ‘can’ sounded like ‘kehn’. But he still carried that indefinable air of someone who was up for whatever life threw at him, and Scott hoped, profoundly, that he would prove an ally. Because chances were their survival depended on some quality problem solving right now, and he lacked the kind of data that he need to make that work.

“Yuri, our plane is late.”

Under the felt cap, Yuri’s eyebrows rose.

“He has left you behind, your brother?”

Scott kept his smile but tilted his head, the subtlest negative he could manage. 

“He would never do that intentionally. But something could have stopped him.”

“Huh.” Yuri sniffed expressively, then had to hack away the ash he inadvertently inhaled. “Is Moscow. Is Putin. He is happy we are in the volcano.” He waved an arm out to the ocean. “He sends jets to stop you, perhaps.”

“Maybe.” Scott’s heart thumped in alarm at the thought of military intervention – it hadn’t been an option he’d factored in, and it was a terrifying one. But Virgil’s possible woes were not his focus right now. “Yuri, is there anywhere we can take people to shelter them? We need to be thinking about what we can do if my brother doesn’t get back to us in time.”

“Perhaps. But it’s not easy.”

“We might be able to help with that part. Can you show me?”

Yuri shook his head.

“Is too hard for older ones. Arkasha and me, we can make it. Others, not so much.”

“Show me,” Scott urged. Yuri shrugged and turned to the right of the tunnels, giving a sharp whistle as he did so that brought the young man he’d been talking with earlier to his side.

“This is Arkady. We will show you.”

“Stay here,” Scott said to Gordon.

“Fun City. Why would I wanna leave?”

Scott slapped him on the shoulder then hurried to follow Yuri and Arkady as they reached the opening to yet another tunnel, this one extremely narrow and requiring all three to stop and take turns to enter. It headed into the depths of the rise on this side that, with the hill on the other, created a deadly channel for anything coming from the volcano. The tunnel narrowed even further within a few feet, and twisted around on itself before rising sharply. There was no light for the young men ahead of them, but in a sense it wasn’t needed; the tunnel allowed nothing but forwards and back, and they were most definitely pressing forward. Scott’s helmet light showed shining black walls that reflected the beam in disorienting jags of brightness. It was both claustrophobic and noisy, the sound from the roots of the volcano echoing up through the rock and bouncing between the walls.  
They could perhaps shelter some of the people in here. It would depend on where it opened out as to whether or not it would escape the melted mud and magma, but as the tunnel continued upwards Scott began seriously considering it as a last redoubt.

Until grey light began filtering down towards him, and he found himself following the young men out onto a ledge in one of the most extraordinary landscapes he had ever seen.

It was if the promontory was a giant honeycomb and someone had taken a massive ice cream scoop from it. The overhang left by the scoop – in fact, the collapse of a massive section of rock into a jumble below – extended perhaps 60 feet over the cavity, itself more than fifty feet deep. At the far side, where the overhang began, Scott could see the hollows and tunnels that formed so much of this area.

The possibilities were immediate and heart-lifting.

“How far back do those tunnels go?”

“Maybe thirty metres. But is hard climb from here.”

“You’ve done it?”

“Me and Arkasha. Is dangerous.”

“Yes.” But Scott had swung his pack down and was rummaging in it before pulling out the harness he used for transporting multiple people on a zip-line. “But this might change things.” With one smooth action he raised his zip-line gun and fired it towards the upmost point of the far side. The arc meant the claw that dug into the rock landed ten feet below the aim-point.

“Arkady, you need to come with me. I’ll need you on the other side to help people get unharnessed and back into those tunnels. Yuri, you need to get everyone up here as fast as possible.”

He turned to face two equally sceptical expressions. In spite of the situation, he managed a chuckle.

“Come on, Arkady. Let me show you.” He attached the automatic lifting mechanism to the zip-line, wrapped the harness around his wrist, then gestured Arkady closer. The young man looked questioningly at Yuri who, after a moment’s hesitation, nodded. Arkady pressed against Scott, and moments later both were being whizzed up the line, straight for the honeycombed cliff beneath the sheltering overhang.

“Zayebis!” In six seconds Arkady’s feet were touching down in the far tunnels, and Scott released him. The young Russian’s face, covered as it was by ash and grime, still allowed his eyes to sparkle as he gave a shout back to his friend.

“I take it that’s approval.” Scott grinned at him, then pointed back into the caves. “Take them through here, deep as you can.” When he looked back to where they’d left Yuri, he saw that he’d already gone back into the tunnel to begin bringing the last of the group up the narrow passageway to a possibility of survival. 

“Good boy,” Scott muttered. He readied himself for the return journey, knowing he would have to do this often enough that his shoulders would be screaming by the end. But as Plan Bs went, this one might just work, and given the apocalyptic nature of the situation, that was the kind of miracle he could recognise and applaud.

Now it just remained to get one hundred and three people through the tight and twisting tunnel, harnessed and up the zip-line and deep into the caves, even as the volcano readied its most destructive phase. 

One hundred and four with Gordon.

Piece of cake.

“But Virgil, if you could drop by and offer another option, I wouldn’t say no.” With a nod to Arkady he flew back across the chasm to the ledge below, ready to begin a laborious rescue with multiple possible failure points but with a real chance of success. Given the day he’d had, the days, he’d take that and gladly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Zayebis - fucking great


	7. Don't Dance on a Volcano

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A slow evacuation in the face of an eruption - this is Gordon's own nightmare.
> 
> _Don't dance on a volcano - French proverb._

Galina stood against the rock face of her erstwhile home, a part that was sheltered by a sharp overhang as the ash and scoria continued to pour down upon them. Her scarf was pulled up tight around her mouth, but her eyes were unflinching in their scrutiny of the people gathered around her. It was plain to Gordon that she was reckoning – hope and despair, survival and annihilation – in the kind of internal and contained monologue she had done many times before. There was something compelling about her indomitable presence. He stepped over to join her.

“I’m sorry Two hasn’t come back. I don’t know why.”

The slightest of shrugs. Betrayal always formed part of her reckoning.

From where he now stood Gordon could look through the curtain of ash at a great nothingness of charcoal grey. Sea and sky had been melded into one kind of oblivion that stretched everywhere and nowhere. Beneath his feet the earth continued to vibrate, ominous and overwhelming. 

“They’ll come back. They won’t leave us.”

She spared him one scornful glance.

It was pointless trying to defend the indefensible, so Gordon turned his attention to the numbers at play. 

One hundred and three people. All now huddled tight under the shelter that was going to be their tomb in minutes. If Scott couldn’t conjure something up – and really, what the hell was he likely to find in that tiny tunnel? – then this was going to be International Rescue’s greatest and final failure. At least there were no children left. And the very old – there was something about the least powerful that always brought Gordon’s urge to protectiveness to its full extent. But even with that rationalisation, the sight of so many people left to an excruciating death in this bleak place hurt.

For himself, he tried to avoid the fact that this was testing everything he knew of his own courage. There was a constant scream in the back of his mind, one that urged speed and action and defiance, and it warred with the other sound, the one that he didn’t want to acknowledge. The one that sounded awfully close to a whimper.

Waiting, helpless and under imminent threat, was Gordon’s personal nightmare.

Another violent rumble sent a cascade of collected ash down from the overhang, and several larger boulders, bright red and trailing smoke, crashed to the platform in front of them.

“Ohhh, man,” Gordon said, involuntarily. He pressed further back into the rock face. 

To his surprise he felt a hand on his arm, pressing reassurance, and he turned to look at Galina.

Sha said nothing, but her look told him everything she knew about facing the worst odds with spirit and dignity intact.

A shout from the tunnel down which Scott had disappeared, and suddenly Yuri was there, waving them all over towards him, urgency in every action. He was yelling over the volcano’s sinister hissing, telling them something that made Galina’s hand tighten almost painfully above Gordon’s elbow.

“What is it?” Gordon grabbed her back. “What’s he saying?”

“There is something.” She let go and hurried over to where people were beginning to push towards the tunnel entrance.

In a second Gordon’s experience of emergency evacuations told him that this was a new kind of disaster unless they could organise the desperate people crowding forward. The tunnel could take only one at a time. A crush at the entrance could mean a bottleneck that denied a chance to almost a hundred others.

“Wait! Wait, Yuri, stop them.”

But Yuri had already realised the danger, his arms up, physically restraining an older woman who was trying to get past him into the tunnel entrance, already crowded with three others pushing through.

“Galina!” Gordon caught up to her. “Galina, we have to slow them down. It’s got to be one at a time.”

For the first time he saw the uncertainty beneath her stoicism.

“But we must go – “

“One at a time.”

And here was the sudden and most awful reckoning. Because now, an order of evacuation, of getting into the tunnel, was the probable marker between life and death. How could anyone make that call? How could anyone stand back when salvation was mere feet away and you were being told to wait, wait, until the killing cloud descended?

It was all Gordon could do not to sprint past everyone and grab at his own chance. 

The idea hung there for a second, shimmering and clear, and even as he saw it and longed for it he mourned it as an impossibility. 

It wasn’t who he was. It wasn’t what *they* were.

It was very likely that he was going to die here just to prove that point.

Galina’s voice rang out, and the surging crowd paused. It was a measure of her incredible authority that even here and now she could bring order out of primal chaos. For a long moment nothing happened, the people pushing into the entrance framed in some ghastly frieze of terror. Then, even as Gordon thought it was hopeless and he was helpless, the crowd stilled, swayed, and by an act of communal restraint breathtaking in its courage, pulled back under the overhang into some kind of line.

Yuri nodded to Galina and disappeared back into the tunnel. Gordon had no idea what Scott had found, and the lack of communication was terrible in its isolating nature, but he must have found something or he would never have sent Yuri back. And Yuri must have a role to play further down the tunnel, or he would not have gone ahead. In spite of the fact Gordon had only known the young Russian a brief time, he knew that about him already.

The line began shuffling forward, as fast as people could squeeze into the cleft of rock.

Gordon’s mind raced into the calculations that formed part of his working life. At this rate, with this number, how long? How many? The harshest of it was the outstanding variable; when was the volcano going to release its worst? A minute from now? Half an hour? Hours?

Not hours, no. The thought was a comfort he couldn’t afford. John had been certain. Eruption had been imminent twenty minutes ago. It must be overdue.

He wrapped his arms about himself.

Galina grabbed him again.

“Go. You should go. This is not your fight, tovarishch.”

He gave her the best smile he could summon.

“No. I’m last through. That’s my job.” He gestured at the shuffling line, the one that was a human expression of anxiety in bodily form. “I gotta see everyone clear.”

She looked at him, expressionless, then raised a hand to his shoulder to squeeze it.

That almost undid him, so he cleared his throat. Something to do. Something to do. Anything but this excruciating wait.

“Do we know everyone’s out? Has anyone checked? I’ll go check.”

Before Galina could respond he ducked away, into the nearest entrance to the underground chambers that had been these people’s shelters for long dreary months.

Without the help of even the meanest sunshine, the interior of the caves was dark and gloomy. Gordon switched on his helmet lights and looked about him.

He saw pictures on the walls; some hand-painted, some by children of fairies and monsters and rockets, others showing lost landscapes, gardens, valleys, lakes. Beneath lay the deserted belongings in disorder across boxes and old cases that had once been used as tables.

Another bubble of frozen rock, another family’s pitiful existence revealed. Old photos of loved ones left behind in their initial escape, now abandoned forever; old documents scattered across the floor, useless in the face of existential threat, soon to be nothing but carbonised particles. 

“Anyone here?” He poked his head out to the narrow alleyway that had naturally formed between the chambers, where the brittle surface level rock had collapsed to let the light and air of the valley into these tight little holes. The resultant debris had been cleared away, leaving once easy passage that was now choked with ash and pumice, still smoking. He stepped across and into another labyrinth of rock rooms, calling out as he did so.

A crash, and a curse from a chamber further in.

Gordon hurried through a narrow crack, ducking his head at the last minute as the roof lowered exponentially, and found a large, older man cramming things into a bulging suitcase.

“Hey! Hey, guy, you gotta get out of here.”

He reached out, but the man pulled away.

“Nyet! Idi nahuy!”

“Look, I don’t know what you’re saying because my Russian swearing is kinda rusty, but we gotta go. This whole place is a death trap.”

The man continued stuffing small bags into the suitcase, one that already looked as if it was about to burst.

“Seriously, fella. You’re not going to get that through the tunnel. It’s not even gonna get into the damn thing.”

The ground shook, and pieces of rock fell from the ceiling, hitting the man and Gordon’s shoulder, eliciting a, “Pizdec!” from the man. He finally dropped the case to the floor, knelt on it and locked it, sweating profusely as he did so. When Gordon stepped aside the man shoved past him, muttering something that sounded like “Debil,” and Gordon watched him head towards the outside with a mouth dropped open in incredulity.

Sometimes people could be the absolute worst.

“People under stress, Gordo,” his mind supplied in Virgil’s voice, counselling compassion.

Yeah. Hard to feel compassion for someone so obviously valuing belongings of some kind over his own life.

Shaking his head, Gordon continued his search. Every step took him closer to the danger, and he felt the battle in his own body as the deepest part of him urged a fast flight in the other direction. Bargaining worked. _Just one more room, and then I’ll go back. Just one more passageway and then I’ll run for it. Last one and it’s time to go. Just one more…_

At last it really did seem as if he’d reached the end of the inhabited portion of the valley. The final two chambers were empty of anything but rubble. It was with a surge of relief that he turned back to the way he’d come, and began to jog towards the feeblest of lights ahead even as his own helmet light caught a hitherto hidden entrance to his right.

A whimper. As if his internal self had manifested in some forgotten hollow, his own deep-seated fear echoing to him from this dark and cold place of refuge.

For a second, his fear told him that he was imagining it, _hurry, go_. Instead, he stopped and took a deep breath.

“Hello?” He leaned in and shone his light around the tiny room.

In the corner, immediately vivid in their red and yellow sweaters and golden blonde hair, two children and a young woman huddled together, wrapped so tightly that it was hard to see where one began and the other finished.

Kids. Oh no, not kids.

He thought his own anxiety was at its highest peak. He discovered just how wrong he could be.

“Hey, hey.” Instinctively he crouched down, hands out, gentling and calm. “What are you guys doing here? You need to come with me.”

The woman shook her head, holding the children even tighter. Gordon couldn’t tell if she understood his language or just what he represented. He had encountered this before; people so convinced of their own death that they found a way to make it as close to their own terms as they could. He understood it. But he dreaded it, every time. People like this were some of the hardest parts of a rescue mission, resisting the help they needed in favour of rejecting the hope that tortured them.

And there was never time. Never time for comforting and counselling and the slow convincing that survival beckoned. Was here at hand, if they’d only come with him.

The fact was, of course, that he could well be selling them an absolute lie. That staying here together might provide them the modicum of privacy and dignity in death that they deserved, and that he was only prolonging their agony by dragging them towards an impossible chance.

But he couldn’t go with that. Even as the optimism he’d thought inextinguishable sputtered and failed, he would not take despair its place.

“Come on. Come with me. Come on.” He kept his voice low, even managed to make it sound cheerful. One of the big-eyed children looked up at him, caught by that tone, and the young woman made a sound like a heartbreak. “It’s okay. Okay. Come on.”

He reached out, arms wide, and here was the moment. He wouldn’t stay with them if they didn’t choose to try, because he simply couldn’t concede his own life to an abject death in hiding. But he knew that if they rejected this last chance it would stay with him forever, and that fact meant that every ounce of persuasion he had inherited form his father was pouring from him, in his eyes, his voice, his hands.

A long moment, as the volcano rumbled beneath and around them.

Then one of the children brought one of her tiny hands into his.

“Yes. Da. Pozhaluysta.” It probably sounded nothing like any actual Russian they’d heard in their lives, but the second child looked up at that, and the woman let go, hands covering her eyes, grief and distress in every part of her.

Quickly he scooped the second child up and used the hold on the first child’s hands to lift her upright.

“Come on, mama.” He began backing away, and she made a sound low in her throat.

Even if they did all survive, he knew he had the soundtrack to his next nightmare.

The child in his arms called out, stricken, and that was the final factor that got her to her feet, moaning, but following as he backed out of the room, into the ashy passageway, and began jogging towards the sea.

Large rocks continued to fall, and the hissing from the volcano now sounded as if it was happening right on top of them. The child he was holding burrowed his face into Gordon’s shoulder, and Gordon swore under his breath as he tried for as much speed as he could over a surface treacherous with debris.

They came out to find the crowd reduced by well over half, still pressing into the tunnel, and Galina arguing with the large older man Gordon had encountered previously. Without stopping, Gordon ran past the queue and shouldered a place at the front for the woman and the children. There were cries of distress and sorrow as she was recognised. He didn’t understand what the people were saying, but he knew they were not angry about queue-jumping. The people due to go next willingly stepped back, touching the young woman and the children in the saddest of benedictions as they disappeared into the tunnel without a word of acknowledgement to Gordon.

He didn’t care. He wasn’t going to be watching children incinerated. A long drawn out breath came from him, as he caught Galina’s eye and she nodded to him in thanks.

The vision out to sea was even more obscured, denying him that small comfort. But he found he was looking upwards, not down, peering through the occlusion in his last, small but faithful hope.

With everything he had, he created the wish.

A burst of green to come through the clouds of ash please, right about now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Debil - moron  
> Nyet - no  
> Pizdec- fuck  
> Idi nahuy - fuck off (can I just say I am impressed with the sheer number of ways you can express something to do with 'fuck' in Russian?
> 
> And now Mt Etna is erupting. I might have to just accept that this story is some kind of summoner of volcanic disaster.


	8. When the Mountain Comes to You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Time's up.

Arkady was a godsend.

In the face of frightened people clinging to Scott’s body like they intended to be permanent additions, he was nimble, fast and ruthless in detaching them, unhooking them, and sending Scott back on his way down to where Yuri waited with the next four. And Yuri was proving to be equally adept at focusing people appalled or transfixed by the suddenly looming abyss in front of them as they exited the tunnel onto the small ledge. By the time Scott had zoomed back to them at the maximum possible speed, one that meant he had to keep his body pulled up tight and braced for the trip to ensure he didn’t slam ruinously into the ledge at the end of it, Yuri had them facing him, briefed as to the next part and the need for them to keep calm and hold tight.

Even so, and even taking four at a time, he was managing only two round trips per minute.

And although the harness kept rescuees secured against him, his body was feeling the effort required to resist the drag of 320 kilograms of mass against gravity and forward propulsion, performed over 20 times now, without pause. Physics didn’t bother sugar-coating the facts about the kind of impact that level of activity had on the human body, however fit. 

And he really, really was not fit. He’d known it going in, and had taken the chance because standing by was unthinkable for him… but he knew, deeply, just what these last five days had cost him, and he knew, too, that whatever reserves of strength adrenaline had borrowed were now past reckoning and overdue.

Scott took a second to wonder if he would be able to stand on his own at this point if he let go of the harness.

Another group – and this time, to his dismay, he saw it included two small children. 

The immediate emotional response was one of horror, and that he quelled quickly as being unusable just now. The next thought was one of time; he and Yuri had become extremely efficient in their harnessing routine, but now adjustments would have to be made, as quickly as possible.

Yuri was clearly feeling the added stress of the children’s presence, gesturing to him in a hurrying motion, as if Scott wasn’t already travelling way too fast, way too often.  
As his boots hit the ledge, Yuri was already lifting the first child towards him, fumbling in his new anxiety to work straps loosened for adults.

“Take it slow, Yuri.” Scott kept his own voice as calm as he could. “We’ve got this.”

“Sure, sure,” Yuri muttered, tugging and turning Scott to take the second child. A young woman crowded close, and then an older one, and Scott had another load to save.  
One of the children squealed as they swung out over the hole, a sound that in Scott’s heart belonged on a fairground attraction, which was born of the kind of excited fear brought about by invented, corralled risk. No child’s cry should ever have this depth to it.

Arkady was just as concerned at the cave edge, reaching for Scott when he was still flying above the drop.

“Sasha! Minka! Shto eta – ivedi deteyii utsyuda!”

“Just get them to the back, Arkady.” Scott waited with patience born of pure mental strength while his four passengers were steadied on the ledge and unharnessed. The young woman was busily disengaging herself before Arkady could get to her, snatching the children as they were freed and stumbling towards where others crowded, well back in the shelter of the strange rock bubbles.

He turned back for the next zip-line run, and stopped.

Yuri was gone.

No one else waited for him.

The numbers didn’t add up; there were 20 more to come, including Gordon.

As he watched, Yuri reappeared, arms wide in the universal gesture of “What the fuck?”

And even as Scott’s brain supplied the answer – _uh-oh, hold up in the tunnel_ – his head lifted as the ongoing rumbling and hissing and cracking that had scored his last thirty minutes of life shifted into something else. Something that was immediately and impossibly more frightening.

A sound like a thousand rocks being crushed and steamrolled towards them, constant, enormous, as if the earth itself was rolling up and dragging with it all the heat it held within. And yet muffled somehow, deadened. Deeply wrong.

He’d heard that sound once before, on an island in the Pacific, as pyroclastic flow escaped a mountain and billowed towards him at 300 kilometres per hour. He remembered the sight of the clouds of ash and rock, building and tumbling and chasing him as he leapt into One and kicked away. He remembered flying above it, seeing the heat haze rise, knowing that the churning mass beneath him held heat of 1,000 degrees, toxic and irresistible for anything in its path.

They were almost out of time.

“Yuri!”

The young Russian was staring back down the tunnel, yelling, but Scott couldn’t hear him anymore. The noise was overwhelming.

Every instinct told Scott to stay where he was, but there could still be time for one more run. Precious seconds that meant four more lives saved, not least Yuri’s. Without hesitation, Scott ran off the ledge at the top of the line and zipped down to the space below, refusing as he did so to turn his head and watch to see if the massive cloud was bearing down upon him. 

He thudded for the last time onto the ledge, and grabbed Yuri’s arm.

“Any sign of them?”

“No one. Something is stopping them.” Yuri’s pale blue eyes were wide with the fear he’d fought so gallantly to suppress until now. Scott stared past him into the cramped darkness.

“We can’t wait. Yuri? We can’t wait. We have to go now.”

“But – “ Yuri raised on hand towards the emptiness where his people waited, trapped. 

“I know. But there’s no time. I have to get you back up there.”

“Why? Why are they not coming?”

“Don’t know. But we do know what is coming. We have to go.”

Reluctantly, Yuri gave one last look at the tunnel and turned to grab onto a harness.

“So many.”

“Yeah.” Scott checked to see that in his distraction Yuri had still managed to attach himself properly, then pushed off, the zip-line taking their lighter weight so swiftly that he almost lost his balance. Six of the slowest seconds of his life passed until he touched down under the relative safety of the cave edge. He unclipped Yuri, then turned to go back.

Yuri grabbed his arm.

“What are you doing?”

Scott freed himself, and shrugged.

“My brother. He’s still down there. Could still come through. I gotta go.”

“No, is too late.”

Scott shook his head, readying for the rush down the line. 

And then he knew, incontrovertibly, that Yuri was right.

What little light was left was suddenly obscured. From under the overhang the sound magnified to an unbearable level, and as he looked up a mass of roiling ash and smoke and scoria billowed along the edge of the hole, to his right. The rise was doing the work he hoped, channelling much of the flow down the valley and away from the little caves, high and inset into the cliff. But even so clouds of toxic gas were pouring over the edge, and instinctively he caught Yuri and dragged him back, back into the deeper shelter, lifting Yuri’s arm to hide his face, protect his eyes and nose and mouth. Ash, scalding, swirled about them. Scott kept himself between Yuri and the heat as best he could until they both fell onto the bodies of the others, already hidden, already screaming their terror.

Gordon.

His little brother was down there. Beneath that.

And even though his helmet was filtering all the air coming into his lungs, even though his body was protected by his suit, Scott found he had forgotten how to breathe.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Sasha! Minka! Shto eta – ivedi deteyii utsyuda!”  
> Што зто – Убедй детей отсюда  
> What is – take the children away (from here)


	9. Because I could not stop for Death

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ... Death kindly stopped for me.

Gordon should have been watching for it, and if he survived he knew he would kick himself for missing the moment, but his first warning was a shout and he turned to see the man with the suitcase push his way past the group at the tunnel entrance and shove his way in.

Galina gave a cry of disapproval, but it was too late. The man was gone, another on the ground where he’d shoved him in order to escape, and Gordon could only hope that the tight little passageway was a lot more accommodating than it seemed from its beginning.

“Wow. What an asshole.”

Probably not diplomatic, but you know? There were times when tact was overrated.

Galina made a sound that from someone else would be a snort.

“He’s a genius.”

“So rules don’t apply, huh?”

“He has his own rules.”

“Yeah. Well. The only genius I know would never behave like that.”

Galina coughed, and tightened the scarf about her mouth, now thick with ash and almost useless as a barrier to the deadly air.

“Still.” He tried to keep his voice upbeat. “They’re not coming back. Scott must have found something up there.”

“Yes.” Galina’s tone told him she wasn’t expecting much.

“And if – “ 

There was a raised voice at the entrance, and as Gordon looked over, his heart thumped.

The line had stopped. The thin Russian about to take his turn began pushing back at the others crowding behind him, yelling.

“Holy shit.” Gordon didn’t often indulge in swearing on a rescue because he was a professional, dammit, but sometimes it just felt entirely necessary. “He’s got stuck, hasn’t he?”

Galina hurried over to the entrance, and Gordon followed. As he did he glanced around. Twelve people and he left outside. About eight in the tunnel, and no way of getting more in unless the blockage was cleared.

“Let me see,” he said, firmly, and those craning around the thin man at the head of the queue stepped back, allowing him to pull the last one away and peer into the darkness. His helmet light revealed a frightened woman and beyond her another, and another. Clearly the older man had reached a point down the tunnel through which he couldn’t or wouldn’t pass, and there was no room in the tunnel for anyone else to enter as things stood.

“Alright.” His mind raced, solutions formed and discarded before he slung his bag to the ground and began rummaging in it. “I’ve got an idea. Hold tight here, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Galina gripped his arm. “You can - ?”

“Maybe.” From the bag Gordon pulled the special climbing gloves that would allow him to attach himself to the rock. “I’ll see if I can squeeze along the roof. Get to Jerkface and get the suitcase of stupid past the block point.”

Galina nodded, almost pushing him.

“Go. Go.” She called to the people in the tunnel and, with obvious reluctance, three of them backed out. The others, further down the tunnel, couldn’t hear Galina over the unending cacophony of the volcano and stayed within.

Gordon nodded and slipped inside. He hadn’t entered the tunnel before, and straight away found that the first, twisting section was narrower than the passage that opened up. He quickly reached a spot where a handful of others were calling and railing against the stoppage. 

He pulled one back. Startled, the man looked at him as if unable to recognise what he was seeing. Gordon gestured past him.

“Gotta get up there, fix it.”

The man shook his head and pressed back into the helpless queue, but Gordon grabbed him again, harder this time.

“Stay here,” he said, as sternly as he knew how. It would surprise those who didn’t see him in rescue mode just how forceful he could be when needed, and he held enough authority in his voice and expression that the man, resentfully, squeezed backwards, allowing Gordon access.

But that was as far as he could get in an ordinary way. Bodies ahead were packed tightly, people crying out in distress, and he knew the time it would take to extricate each one was time he didn’t have. He scanned the glassy rock, took a step back, then jumped up as high as he could to slap the gloves against the surface, finding a purchase and bringing his legs into a tight tuck beneath him.

To make this work he would have to Spiderman his way along, over their heads, until he could reach the blockage. It meant he would have to be supporting his lower torso almost entirely through his abdominal muscles, because he would be crawling sideways, but the challenge of it brought a tiny frisson of pride. He knew his body. He could do this.

Keeping as tight against the rock as he could, he gradually extended one hand ahead and pulled himself over the refugees below. As he took one hand from the rock it meant he was supporting himself entirely with the other, and the strain was immediate and heavy. But moving as fast as he could kept the effort spread from one side of his body to the other, and before long he had a strange kind of lizard-like slither happening, one that took him ten metres along the tunnel – even if occasionally a leg strayed down and kicked the head of some unfortunate below.

His helmet light showed the black coat of the man with the suitcase. The genius who had managed to foul up the chance for survival for all the people behind him.

“Hope it was worth it, pal,” Gordon growled. The man screwed his head around to watch him approach, his face unreadable. The suitcase was wedged hard into the tight turn, caught at an angle where a small outcrop of rock jutted into the passage. Given Gordon’s current feelings towards the gent below him he did not hesitate to swing his body down and place both feet firmly on the man’s shoulders.

“Here. Let me – ugh – “ He tried to lean over and lift the case by the handle, pulling hard, but it stayed stuck.

“Suka blyat! Yidi utsyuda!”

“Yeah, you and whose army,” Gordon said. He straightened up, and placed both hands on the wall, lifting himself off the man’s shoulders. Tightening his abs, he swung his feet backwards and then struck forward with as much force as he could. The case shifted sideways, and the man pushed at it, freeing it almost at once. He thrust it in front of him, held high and clear of the outcrop, and just like that the line was moving again. Gordon had to press back to let people squeeze past his legs, hanging as he was from the ceiling.

The thought came to him that he could drop down and keep going, onwards to meet Scott and whatever sanctuary lay ahead in the dark passage. No one would blame him, he knew. But even as the idea came, it drifted away. It just didn’t feel right. There might yet be work for him to do back on the platform, under that harrowing sky, and the not knowing would be more unbearable than the continued waiting with Galina and the rest. With a sigh he shifted himself to face back the way he’d come, and shimmied his way above the new heads now crowding through the tunnel.

He headed back towards the almost imperceptible light that meant the outside world wasn’t visible until the first, tightest turn was navigated. The tunnel dipped lower here, too, so Gordon eventually had to drop down and force his way against the human tide in order to re-join the last remaining few. It was heartening to see that only three people, including Galina, had yet to take the escape route.

“Alright?”

But as he asked, Galina whipped about, looking up and back towards where the volcano was wreaking its havoc on their world. And he caught it, then, what had startled one of the most stoic woman he’d ever meet. A thunder coming up from the ground, roaring across it, immense and unstoppable, and he knew their time was up.

The topmost edge of the massive pyroclastic cloud appeared high above the valley floor, right above them, seconds away.

“Go! Go! Into the tunnel!”

Screams, and restraint was lost. The last three pushed frantically, and Gordon grabbed Galina and bodily lifted her to the entrance, shoving her through. There was room for her to get around the first bend, but then the trailing edge of her coat showed that her progress was almost immediately stopped.

The delay, the last scramble, meant the evacuation was too slow. 

There was no room for him.

For fully five seconds his mouth dropped open in silent horror, his mind frozen in the face of inescapable death.

Then one thought.

One chance.

He turned on his heel and sprinted, straight for the edge of the cliff. The cloud would hit the water and turn it into boiling steam but he would go deep and out, as fast and as far as he could, a race beyond any he’d ever undertaken before. A dive of sixty feet and then twenty feet more, and more again. 

He reached the edge, and with a yell more like a scream, threw himself out of the fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Suka blyat! Yidi utsyuda!
> 
> Fucking bitch! 
> 
> Once again, the capacity for swearing Russian dazzles me.


	10. The Killing Ash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Virgil and Alan join the fight.

They were flying into dusk, a dirty one full of snow as they approached land, so Umnak stayed obscured until they dropped under the clouds and saw the distinct volcanic shape that dominated the southwestern part of the island.

“Is that a volcano?” Virgil tried to keep his voice from a querulous rising. “A volcano with steam coming out the top?”

“Uh, yeah. Don’t worry.” Alan looked down at the screen in front of him. “It’s Mount Vsevidof. It’s an active stratovolcano that – “

“Active?” And yeah, okay, that time his voice did go up an octave. “What the hell?”

“- that hasn’t erupted since 2022. And before that it was 1957. It’s fine, Virgil, really. Penelope says her friends take people on tours right down into the caldera.”

“So that steam coming out the top there – “

“Is just Mount Vsevidof doing its thing.” 

Barely mollified, because Virgil’s attitude towards all things volcanic at this point was borderline hostile, he turned his attention to locating the airfield.

“Nikolski Airport directly ahead,” Alan said. Beside him the Russian man leaned forward, scanning their place of possible salvation with eyes that spoke of cynicism and worry.

“What about the other one?” Virgil indicated with his head to where another large snow-covered volcano loomed across much of the northern part of Umnak. 

“Oh, that’s Okmok. Great name, huh?” Alan’s tone was suspiciously light, so Virgil sent him a side eye, purely out of reflex. 

“And that’s active too?”

“Uh – yeah.” A mumble, and Virgil snapped, “Say again?”

“Last erupted in 2053. But you know, that’s good. That means it probably won’t need to vent for a long time.”

“Which suggests this other one could go any minute?”

“No, that’s – that’s not how they work.”

By this time Virgil had swung Two around to comfortably drop down onto the Nikolski Airport, the piece of extraordinary engineering completed in World War Two to allow US troops access to and from the island. 

“Someone’s down there,” Alan said. Virgil caught it; a handful of flashlights, and behind that, an all-terrain vehicle with its lights left on, illuminating their path. He looked beyond the airstrip to the settlement; a scattering of small homes in a bleak landscape, with one large hangar tucked close by the landing. A check of his instruments showed wind gusting at 83kph, flinging the snow at his windshield. 

Everything about rescue situations was relative. This was undoubtedly inhospitable, grim, and no long term solution – but compared to what they’d left, it was Virgil’s notion of Eden.

“Are they gonna have room for all these people?” Alan’s murmur caught Virgil’s thoughts.

“For now. People can squeeze into just about any space when survival is at stake.”

“Is good.” Their Russian interloper pronounced his judgement after his long inspection, crowding forward, intensity in every line of his body.

Not hard to guess the feelings that must have been torturing him, and Virgil felt a pang of empathy. He wanted Scott and Gordon back, now. 

“That’ll do me.” Virgil set Two down on the wintry runway and released the module. “I’ll come with you, Al. We need these people cleared fast.”

They used the internal lift to collect those crammed into the sickbay, and then lowered it to the cold and comfortless airstrip. Burdened by nothing but ash and worry their passengers stumbled off, joining those streaming from the module, to be met by a tall woman hurrying forward with blankets.

“Welcome, welcome.” She stretched out a hand as she passed off the blankets to survivors passing by, and Virgil took it, even as he wanted to skirt the talking and just get people on the ground as soon as possible. “I’m Igasiẋ, this is my home of Qaluun, means place of hot springs. Used to be Fort Glenn. Penelope said there are over 200 people coming?”  
“Got 170 here,” Virgil confirmed. “More coming, as soon as we can get them. You got anywhere to put them?”

Igasiẋ nodded.

“For now. The hangar. It’s heated. We’ll billet the injured in the houses, anyone who needs extra attention, the babies.” She twisted her mouth, eyes invisible behind the goggles she wore against the snow. “Gonna be tight.”

Virgil’s relief at the pure capability emanating from the woman before him was immense.

“Thank you. This is temporary. Has Penelope filled you in on..?”

“The shit-show government decisions being made? Nothing new, believe me.” She folded her arms. “These people have a place on Chalukaẋ, as long as they need it, but we’re gonna need supplies.”

“Chalukaẋ?”

“The old name for this place. Adele and I like to try a bit of reclaiming of Aleutian heritage. This snow will stop overnight, and I will be able to fly to Fox Island for as much as I can bring back without anyone taking notice. One piece of luck – we just re-stocked for the season a week ago, in Kodiak. Doubt anyone will notice the doubling up. So we’ve got food, some tents, some bedding. We’ll need a lot more, but… Alright. That little guy seems to have cleared them all out.”

Virgil turned about to watch as Alan helped the last of the older folk from the module, steadying them as they met the vicious wind. His little brother had been amazingly efficient in shifting the crowd – or perhaps they were simply motivated by the desire to get clear and let Two go back for their friends, even when it meant bringing children and old people into the swirling snowstorm. He nodded his thanks to Igasiẋ and jogged over to the crowd being shepherded by other islanders towards the hangar that up close looked thoroughly weather-beaten but sturdy nonetheless. A man with a flashlight stood at the access door to the sheltered side, waving them through.

“That’s our work done, Alan. We have to hurry.”

“On it.” Alan handed over the old woman to another of the waiting islanders, then joined Virgil in sprinting back to Thunderbird Two. 

“What’s happening, John?”

John’s voice came through the comms, steady as ever. 

“Eruption still imminent, but nothing’s happened yet. Fast as you can, Two.”

“On it,” said Virgil, echoing Alan as they both took to the lift at a dead run, Alan hitting the button that would ascend them into the cockpit.

They cleared Umnak less than three minutes after landing.

Lady Penelope’s avatar appeared above the control panel as Two’s engines roared the ‘bird up into the wild sky.

“Virgil, I’m _en route_ to Umnak now. Parker and I have 500 nutrition pellets and a week’s worth of analgesics, but I’m afraid there simply isn’t a great deal of room in FAB1 for supplies.”

The nutrition pellets were developed by a subsidiary of Tracy Corporation to provide protein and vitamins in a miniature form easily transported to emergency situations. Each one supplied enough for an adult for 24 hours. Five hundred pellets would supplement Igasiẋ’s supplies and help the immediate nutrition concerns for the survivors on Umnak, giving them just that little more time to negotiate a better solution.

 

“Lady Penelope, that’s great news. Seemed like they had the situation in hand down there.”

“Oh, yes. Adele and Igasiẋ are very smart operators.” Her eyes looked especially large against the darkened sky, and Virgil could read in them the kind of anxiety he was busily swallowing himself. She was wedged against the containers of pellets and holding Sherbert high under her chin, almost as a child might clutch a doll, and the fact of it unconsciously revealed more than he was used to seeing from her. It made his voice gentle.

“We’re heading back now. ETA nine minutes. Don’t worry, we’ll get them all out.”

“Oh, I’m sure you will.” He could see the effort it took to lift her chin, find a smile. “And in the meantime, we’ll try and make ourselves useful. I’m still sending out feelers regarding where our Mayflies could eventually be taken, and I might have an option coming through from Ottawa. Nothing firm yet, but it’s a possibility.”

“That’s exactly what we need,” said Virgil, warmly.

“Right. I’ll leave you to it.” Penelope disappeared, and Virgil refocused on Two’s speed and elevation. Both were as optimal as he could make them.

“This is some rescue, huh?” said Alan.

“One for the books.” He heard the need for reassurance, and answered it. “Feels like it’s kinda out of control, and that’s not how we like to play it. But we’ve just saved 170 lives, and we’re about to save another 103 more. It’s going okay, Al.”

“Yeah, yeah. We’ve got time.” Nervous, strained, but Virgil appreciated the effort.

They dropped down through the cloud cover once more, but this time they were met with streaks of black, hitting and almost immediately disappearing from the windshield as the polymer in the glass and the gradient of the shield whisked away the moisture. The trails of black rising up over their heads gave a ghastly effect to the feeble winter light hitting the cockpit, drawing dark lines across their faces as they peered forward. Already the violent red of the volcano’s caldera was glowing through the darkness of the smoke and steam that now covered the entire area.

“Hell,” Alan breathed.

“Or something like it,” Virgil agreed. “We’ll need to – “

But before he could finish, Alan cried out, just as John’s voice shot through the ether, both cries carrying nothing but horror.

“It’s erupting!”

“What? Where? I can’t see – “ But then he could, and his stomach dropped as his mouth opened and his mind shrieked denial.

“John! Have you got Scott? Where are they?”

John was shaking his head, his eyes betraying his near panic.

“I need you close in order to make connection.” 

“Oh, we’ll get close.” Virgil headed Thunderbird straight towards the monstrous cloud of super-heated ash that billowed before him. “Got any last location?”

“Nothing definite. The whole surface is too hot to pick up heat signatures, and visual is completely obscured. Maybe to the right? EOS thought she got a trace of Scott’s bio-read from there, but – everything’s working against us here.”

“To the right.” Virgil swung Two around and brought her down to fifty feet above the hilltop, just to the side of the main pyroclastic flow. From there he and Alan strained to see some sign, anything, that would give a clue to their brothers’ whereabouts. As the smoke eddied and roiled they both caught occasional glimpses of what seems to be a unique geographical feature, a huge hole carved backwards into the hill.

EOS’ voice came through, her program lending her concern and earnestness to please.

“I have increased the pitch ratio in the frequency modulator. If Scott is communicating, I should be able to locate him.”

“Thanks, EOS.” John’s hand movements were frantic, working his controls for every possible point of access through the choked airwaves. “If we can just – “

“… cave… twenty five… so can’t… ”

“What?” Virgil yelled, as Alan cried, “Scott!” and John made a sound that re-defined relief. “Scott, where are you? Scott, this is Thunderbird Two, we’re above the site. Guide us in, One.”

An agonising silence as John worked again, and then the crackling transmission came once more.

“… here? We’re in a cave, up above a… Virgil, need to cut down into rock, about 35 metres from… all, but need evac now… “

“Thirty five metres back from the edge?” Virgil glared downwards, seeing nowhere safe to land, nowhere obvious to deploy the laser that would melt the rock as Scott asked. 

“Makes sense,” John said, his voice back under tight control. “They’re sheltering under that overhang. Difficult and dangerous and too slow to take them by lift.”

“We’ll cut a vertical access tunnel, get them out directly to the module,” Virgil confirmed. “Just don’t want to fry anyone while I do it.”

“Scott, can you confirm distance?” 

Nothing but crackle through the comms, and Virgil ground his teeth in frustration.

“Okay, gotta take a best guess. We’ll go with 35, only hope that’s what he meant. Alan, I need you to find me a place where we can set down.”

A sudden, sharp pang as he recalled asking Gordon to do the same thing less than an hour ago, at the same place.

“Well, if we take the 35 metres as accurate, just about – there,” Alan said, and Virgil nodded at where he was pointing.

“Use the laser to cut down ten metres. Better to go too far than not enough. I’ll use the exo-suit and clear a way. Then we’ll have to get them up here, use the emergency ladder.”  
“Whoa,” Alan said, frowning at the screen. “This is so fragile. I don’t know if it’s gonna take our weight.”

“Got to try.” As carefully as if he were setting a leaf on a bubble, Virgil guided his ‘bird down, agonisingly slowly in the face of eminent peril. As the forward prop touched the ground it broke through the crust, tilting Two forward. Immediately Virgil touched the v-tol to regain equilibrium, bringing Two back to hover a foot above the ground.

“That’s it for trying to land, then. John, can you stabilise Two from there? I’m gonna be needed on the ground, and we’ve got a hell of a lot of fast moving hot air shifting the atmosphere around us. Alan, we need that hole now.”

“I have you.” John worked his controls, then glanced at something to his left.

“The air quality readings I’m getting are pretty bad. Sulphur dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, carbon monoxide. Take the re-breathers; anyone down there is going to need them.”

“How many do we have?” Virgil asked Alan.

“Uh – 25, I think?”

“You think? We need to know.”

“No, no, it’s 25.”

John sent Virgil a sharp look. _Take it down a notch._ Virgil drew in a breath.

“Okay. I’ll bring them up, you get them into the module and do triage to figure out who gets a re-breather.”

The laser was deployed, slicing into the brittle rock and sending up plumes of dust and smoke.

“I don’t even think you’re going to need your exo-suit,” Alan said. “It’s just all crumbling away.”

“Well that’s a break.” Virgil locked the controls and swung his chair back. “Come on, Al. Scott and Gordon will be getting antsy by now.”

They hurried to the lift, Virgil pausing only for a second to get a confirming nod from John as the control of Thunderbird Two was transferred to him. His ‘bird was as secure as they could make her, suspended between hell and heaven, a lone green thing in a world of dark and fire.

Jumping from the lift Virgil felt the power of the eruption burrowing up through his belly, hammering at the back of his neck. The almost instant sensation of terror in the face of the revolt of the Earth caused him to take a step back, reaching for the nearest prop, needing the reassurance of deliverance floating above whatever monstrous thing had upended the world.

“You okay, Virge?”

He looked to where Alan was nervously scanning the steam and ash, watching for threat, hoping for survivors.

His kid brother had already stood on this awful ground. And was back for more.

If it wasn’t perspective, it was at least a promise, one they made every time they pulled on the uniform. He pushed away from his ‘bird and trotted to where the newly cut hole smoked.

“You’re right. I don’t even need to clear this. It’s just crumbled. Okay – I’ll go down, see where we need to cut a transection to get to these people.”

He unhooked his zipline and used an attachment to the underbelly of Two to allow him to drop towards the bottom of the hole. Halfway down he came across the beginning of the honeycombed rock, half bubbles, half eldritch chambers, and as he peered through the murk he saw bodies – people stirring, raising harried faces to where he swung. One by one they scrambled to their feet and began staggering towards him. He could see streaming eyes, hear ragged coughs. He watched as several sank back to the cavern floor, despite their desperation to leave. 

These were people who needed evacuation, and not just for escape from immediate peril. These were medical cases, and he flashed onto Umnak, their hopelessly inadequate destination.

No point in thinking of that now. First things first. He called back up to Alan.

“These people aren’t going to be able to climb up, Alan. Any ideas?”

“Yeah. One.” Alan loomed over the edge, and in his hand he held the end of the large magnet that was used to retrieve Thunderbird Four from the surface of the sea and the dry tubes sent up from the seabed. “I figure we can attach this to the ladder and drop the ladder down, get people to hang onto it. Then I’ll retract it. Kind of like a conveyor belt. All they’ll have to do is hang on.”

Virgil allowed himself a wry grin. “Wow. That’s good thinking, little brother. Just might work.”

He gestured, and Alan dropped the ladder down to where he caught it. Then, the end of the ladder in hand, he swung onto the cavern floor and stooped to pass through into the strange world of Kamchatka’s underbelly.

He couldn’t help but look past the people around him to try to see his brothers, but the atmosphere was too full of steam to see more than a few feet. He shook his head, and concentrated on the immediate task.

“Here.” He bent down and helped a retching woman to her knees, hooking her arms through the first run of the flexible metal and nylon ladder. “Hold on. Hold on here. Do you understand?”

She gripped it tightly, convulsively, and he guessed she understood well enough.

He reached for another, and another, lining them up on the ladder, leaving each one when they nodded acknowledgement and he was sure they knew what he wanted them to do. The thought of dropping one of them five metres to the bottom of their access hole was not one he wanted to see come to life.

When he had fifteen people attached to the twenty metre ladder, he tapped his comm.

“Alan, you ready?”

“FAB.”

“Take it real slow until we know they’re okay with it.”

“Got it.”

The slack in the ladder tightened and slowly the line of people began to drag forward. At the last minute Virgil managed to get past them and stand by the hole, steadying the survivors as their bodies were dragged out and upwards, making sure each one was still secure. The ingenious idea worked; in short order they had the fifteen people on the surface and Alan was busily collecting the ladder to send it back down before helping the badly wheezing and coughing survivors into the module.

“I’m purging the module air as fast as I can,” John said over the comm. “Keeping the toxic stuff out. Once they’re in there the oxygen should help.”

“Should I do the re-breathers here now, Virgil, or come back?”

“No.” Virgil was looking around and not liking what he saw. People who lay still when rescue was at hand were never a good sight. “Send them down here. We’ll let the module help the ones already there. I think I’ve got some down here who need them more.”

He peered back up in time to see Alan hold the re-breather case above the edge. He held out his arms, and the case dropped down to him.

With re-breathers in hand he moved back into the caves, a shadowy figure bringing breath and life with one small white mask. It never failed to inspire him, the almost instant impact of fresh air on those who only seconds before were close to death. Several quick gulps and red-rimmed eyes opened, heads raised, hands clutched at answers in Virgil’s arms. Carrying some, guiding others, he collected another fifteen for Alan’s makeshift conveyor belt and gave his brother the go ahead, taking back the re-breathers at the last second to help others still trapped. 

One more load lifted carefully towards the wilder air above that still carried hope where none existed below.

“Scott? Scott, are you here?”

Still no answer, so he bent to his task again, finding the scalded and poisoned and leading them to the hole. Another load; another.

Someone grabbed his arm. He looked down, and saw blue.

“Scott!”

His brother’s head was bowed. Virgil knew how Scott wore exhaustion, how it created a kind of impossible structure around his body that Scott leaned into, his will bending it to his purpose. He had seen Scott swaying where he stood but still directing rescues, still scooping down to lift those who needed it.

This, though – this was different. 

There was a slackness, a surrender.

“Scott? Scott, are you okay?”

And then his brother’s face lifted to meet his, and Virgil suddenly knew it might never be okay again.

“God, Scott,” and he couldn’t help his voice rising, echoing in the steamy darkness, manifesting his fear. “Scott, where’s Gordon?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When researching this story I found a fascinating article in an Alaskan online library that detailed the first ethnographers trips to the Aleutian Islands in the late 18th century. I was looking for a woman's name for use here, and came across he original name of Umnak and Qaluun, mentioned above. There were far fewer women's names than men's (typical) but I did find the word Igasix, which means 'wing', and thought that would make a rather lovely name.  
> I went looking for these names in the hope of being culturally aware and offering respect and representation to the people of Aleutian descent on Umnak. However, I am very well aware that I am ignorant as to the appropriate use or otherwise of these names. If this use is in any way disrespectful, I hope a reader will let me know, and I will immediately remove them; the intent is the exact opposite, but intent can only go so far if offfence, however inadvertent, exists.


	11. At the End of the Tunnel

Unacceptable.

What Scott was trying to tell him was simply unacceptable. This Scott who now sat himself down – voluntarily, on a rescue site – was trying to suggest that Gordon had not survived the pyroclastic flow.

“I’ll check it out when I’ve got these people onto Two.”

Scott shook his head in utter weariness.

“You stay here. We’ll find him after I’m done.” Virgil looked down at him – slumped against a cave wall – and banished everything but focus and complete strength. On some level he had always thought weakness catching. He’d never thought his brother Scott would be Patient Zero.

Just what the hell had happened with Kayo over the last five days?

He touched Scott’s shoulder, briefly, and then took his re-breathers and brought another group back through the caves to Alan’s Ladder. Like Jacob’s, just not so final.

The steam from the meeting of sea and cloud still obscured everything, but even so, after another search through the caves he found himself second-guessing. That was 75 people up top, wasn’t it? There were less than ten left.

People were missing. People hadn’t made it.

In the last group he found the young man he recognised as Yuri. The exposed skin on his face was showing the shininess that spoke of scalding, and he was barely managing to drag air in through his crooked elbow, held in a failing attempt to shield his lungs from the poison outside. Another young man was cradling him, not quite as badly off but still struggling, his body arched in a way that spoke of fighting for breath. Quickly Virgil offered both the last of the re-breathers, and after a moment of disorientation on the part of Yuri and help from his friend, each began sucking in fresh air avidly.

“Yuri, isn’t it? Thanks for your help here. Made a difference. Think you can come up with me now?”

A pause as Yuri kept gulping down air, but at last he nodded, and his friend helped him upright. Virgil took his other arm and together they came back to where the final survivors were gripping onto the ladder. He tapped his comm.

“Smaller run this time, Alan. Let me check it out.”

“Okay, Virgil. I got them. The oxygen in the module is helping alright, But John was just saying we need to go as soon as we can. There’s likely to be lahar flow soon, not to mention – you know, lava.”

Not to mention.

Choking, Yuri removed the re-breather from his mouth and tried to talk. In his distress, the English was lost.

“Ya dumayu, shto an pridyet.”

Virgil held the ladder steady until the momentum of the retraction brought it into smooth motion, then helped the last group up towards Two. Yuri looked over to where Scott slumped, and sent a mute question towards Virgil, even as he wiped at eyes streaming and sore.

“Yeah. He’ll be okay. You need to go.”

The young man nodded and joined the last of the survivors, swinging up towards Alan and the module.

And then Virgil was free to get some more particular answers from his big brother.

“So, Scott. Where did you last see Gordon?”

His brother didn’t look up, just gestured towards the edge of the cave and beyond, into the hole.

“Over here?” Virgil stepped over outcrops, the foot high broken shells of the rock bubbles, until he reached the ledge where the zip-line was still attached. At the other end, only faintly visible through the steam, was another ledge jutting from the cliff face.

“What’s down there?”

Scott lifted his head. It was clear even speaking was an effort.

“Tunnel. We got them up from the valley through a tunnel. Then they stopped coming.”

“Some kind of hold up?”

A weary nod.

Virgil peered through the dense atmosphere, thinking fast.

“Okay. I need to go check it out.”

A kind of groan from Scott, and everything about this collapse from a man Virgil privately considered to be the person least likely to ever surrender was frightening in a way that the seizures of the Earth could never be. One was the natural result of physical forces; the other was the complete subversion of just about everything Virgil knew about himself, his family, his world. If Newton’s laws held then so did Scott’s, and they said that this was a man who never gave up, who never stopped trying.

“No point. I was down there. No one was coming through.”

“Yeah. Well, we can’t know that someone didn’t make it down in those tunnels. I’m gonna need that harness.”

He reached down to take it from him, and Scott pushed his hands away. And that resistance was welcome, a refreshing slice of lemon on top of a blancmange when Virgil had been expecting thick crust apple pie.

With fingers that shook with fatigue, Scott unhooked the harness and handed it over.

Virgil took it, fastened it on himself, and gazed forward to where he was about to go.

“Scott!”

“Yes?”

“Someone’s there.”

“What?”

“There’s someone on the ledge.” Virgil kept the excitement contained, but he let Scott hear it. “Some big guy, who’s – who’s carrying a suitcase?”

“A suitcase? Who the hell would be – never mind. Just go.”

“On it.” Virgil grabbed the zip-line and zoomed down, conscious of the fact that visibility was so poor that judging the landing was always going to be a dicey proposition. Somehow he managed it, running onto the ledge with good enough timing that he didn’t knock into the large man who was, indeed, clutching an almost as large suitcase.

The man grabbed at him.

“There are people here. You will rescue them. But first, you take me.”

“Let me guess.” Virgil tried to stop his lip from curling, but guessed he wasn’t particularly successful at it. “You’re the reason there was a blockage in the tunnel, right.”

“It’s not important.”

“The hell it isn’t. You’re the reason my brother had to wait down here in danger, so you can just plant your ass there and wait until every other survivor is back up top."

“My work is – “

“My work takes precedence here. Sit down.”

Without waiting for a response, Virgil stepped past him towards the tunnel entrance, bristling with something deeper than annoyance.

As he reached it he saw another figure emerging – a woman, coughing, shielding her eyes. He reached for her.

“I got you. Here.” He pulled her over to stand against the cliff face, away from the vertiginous edge. Another person emerged and he guided him to stand beside her. Then another appeared, and the ledge was getting crowded.

“Hey. Suitcase guy. Tell them to wait in the tunnel. They’re probably more protected there. I’ll take them up in lots of four – just wait until I get back before coming out.”

As if to prove his point, after the man had called out a series of instructions, Suitcase Guy began to cough with exposure to the toxic steam. Virgil’s plan to leave him until last melted away; he couldn’t do that, no matter how much he wanted to, if it meant increasing the man’s chance of real damage. With a growl, he went back to him.

“Alright. I’ll take you now. But I am not taking that case.”

The man grabbed it protectively.

“Yes. You must. It’s my work.”

“Your work can rot here for all I care.”

The man straightened up, furious.

“This is the reason we are here! If I leave this, it is for nothing. Nothing!”

“Virgil,” John’s voice cut in, “how are we doing? I don’t want to wait here until those Russian jets turn up.”

“Gahh.” Admitting defeat, Virgil roughly pulled the man and his suitcase over to himself, attached him and two of the others, and set off over the chasm towards where a small patch of blue told him Scott waited.

“Here,” he said, on landing. “Take this guy outta my sight.”

Scott nodded, and wearily began guiding the three towards the back of the caves.

From there the evacuation was orderly. Two more trips, and Virgil chanced a call down the tunnel.

“Hey! Gordon! You doing okay?”

There was no response, but Virgil knew the acute trickery of rocks and tunnels and natural acoustics. He was impatient to see his little brother, but he knew he would be the last in the line. That was just how they did things. He could wait.

By his count, there would be ten left. He considered strapping on five to shorten the number of runs, but each of the people emerging from the tunnel seemed larger than the last, so in the end four was the limit. That left six, and surely Gordon would be in earshot now.

“Hey, Gordo! You coming out any time soon?”

Four more people on the ledge, but no cheering call from within the darkness. The first strong stirring of doubt began in Virgil’s belly, a coldness that gripped him and wouldn’t quite shake clear, even as his mind worked to stay focused and calm and prepared.

Gordon would be fine.

A quake so brutal it shook him from his feet had him grabbing for the wall and the people who swayed dangerously against it. Rocks continued to bounce down around him, some big enough that the thought of them hitting an unprotected head was horrific. Speed was everything here.

He made the second last run, and Scott collected the people distractedly, his gaze going back to the distant ledge and the tunnel even as he unhooked the sagging, frightened survivors.

“You made contact yet?”

“Not yet.” From the depths of him, Virgil summoned something like positivity. “He’ll be there.”

But Scott’s look was frozen into something like a suspension of fear, his own personal pyroclastic flow of cold that was billowing above him. Virgil knew the only thing he could do to wipe that expression from his brother’s face was to bring Gordon over safely.

“By the time you get this lot to the surface, I’ll have him over here.”

No acknowledgement from Scott, and Virgil didn’t wait. He zoomed back down the line and thumped onto the ledge. Slowly, the woman who had been the strongest force on the peninsula, bar nothing, emerged out of the tunnel, head still high but body shaking with stress and the excruciating tension of waiting for life.

And the moment he saw her eyes, her small shake of the head, the volcano and all its misery faded away from his consciousness.

For a long second he simply stared at her; then he pushed past her, into the tiny tunnel and its cloying gloom. His light swung frantically across the ebony glass surfaces, around the outcrops and crevices and crooked little spaces that had protected the last frightened survivors of Maly-K.

“Gordon! Gordon!” He pushed his body down the tunnel, over dropped scarves, torn pieces of coat, down towards where he could feel the encroaching heat building even through the protective layers of rock.

Until he reached the place where the tunnel jagged sharply, and around it bulked a wall of smoking scoria, piled high and pressed down into an impenetrable mass under the sheer power of the flow.

A wall that would forever hold the roar of grief that tore from Virgil’s throat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Ya dumayu, shto an pridyet.”  
> Я думаю, што όн придёт  
> I think that he will come.


	12. Mudbath

A sixty foot dive created one of those moments that defied the laws of gravity and time. It lasted only seconds; it lasted an age.

Long enough for Gordon to experience regret and fear and exhilaration in equal measure.

The sense of implacable downward rush might have overwhelmed someone who had not spent so much of their life in pursuit of just that excitement, who had not danced with the sea and air since his boyhood.

Even as his body launched out into nothingness, his mind worked with it in a partnership forged over many years and moments of both routine and peril.

He had to keep his form. Arms outstretched, connected, head aligned precisely between the two, body angled in such a way so that there was no killing moment of flat backed entry, no neck snap of a lifted head. His helmet and thick neck band would help protect him; his core strength would do the rest. If he wasn’t utterly confident, he was at least pragmatic. He had a good chance.

And even so, he found himself risking one glance downwards towards the black sea below in that awful moment of suspension, wishing for the fall to be over, and dreading the moment of impact.

When he hit, it was nothing he expected, but should have.

The ash that had been covering everything between here and Maly-K had, of course, covered the sea. It formed a glutinous mass that deadened the waves and extended down well beneath the surface, a muddy mat where clear water had once been. It took Gordon’s gathering momentum and stopped it in two body lengths.

The effect was brutal and disorienting. 

All the air was smashed from his lungs. He gasped, suddenly suspended in a blackness that was viscous and immobilising, completely different to everything his mind and body had been prepared for. Conscious only that a thousand degrees of heat was about to descend upon him in this trap, and that he was caught, held, helpless.

Unforgivably, he panicked.

His legs and arms thrashed wildly, completely without coordination or effect. The flow was coming to boil him alive and he couldn’t move. _He couldn’t move._ The sea was nothing but a muddy graveyard, and he was an insect caught in it, waiting for a terrible end.

It took the longest seconds of his life before something or someone came to his rescue. An amalgam of voices from all those over the years who had tried and managed to instil some sense of discipline in his life; coaches, officers, brothers, Grandma, Dad, rolled together into one bellowing command, one compelling order.

_“Get your shit together!”_

Instantly his mind cleared and the frenetic movement stopped. Without thinking he began the organised, systematic movement of his limbs that would pull him down and through, incrementally but effectively, displacing the mud with slow, calculated pulls and kicks.

And then the viscosity gave way, and he was out, into a sea that was just as dark as the mass that precluded light above it but that allowed him the freedom for speed he craved.  
At once his tempo lifted and he accelerated down, twenty feet, thirty, and then changed angle to propel himself as far as he could from where the pyroclastic flow would descend. Lumps of rock drifted down constantly as he swam, and the water was filled with the sediment of the ash above, but he maintained speed, even as his light gave him no help. 

There was no sign of life. Nothing but darkness.

By his constant, anxious calculations it was twenty seconds before he noticed that the water around him was beginning to carry super-heated bubbles.

His suit would protect him – briefly. 

But distance and depth were his only hope of real survival, so he kicked harder, harder, swimming as he hadn’t done for years but remembering the feel of crisis muscles engaging and synchronising into a machine for speed. 

He was so focused on his flight that he could do nothing to stop when his lights suddenly revealed a curtain of agitated bubbles, an entire section of water activated by tremendous heat, directly in front of him. He’d reached the area where the flow had cleared the mat of ash and impacted directly with the sea, boiling it instantly. Ironically, the lack of warning was the best chance he had; his momentum carried him into it and through it, meaning just seconds for his suit to heat to an almost unbearable point only to cool again immediately as he hit the icy Pacific ocean beyond.

The bubbles lessened. Stopped. And there was light, beyond the flow, beyond Kamchatka’s terrors.

He kept swimming parallel to the surface, wanting to be sure, but in his heart he knew he’d made it. The wildest gamble of his life, and it had paid off.

At this depth his suit would protect him from the need for decompression protocols, but even so, he took his time to come back to the surface, angling upwards at a gentle rate so that muscles now shrieking with the unprecedented stress of slamming into mud at 71kph and then swimming an Olympic race could begin to gather all their complaints into one long _owww_.

When he finally broke the surface he bobbed there, looking firstly outward to where black rain was streaming down onto the surface, obscuring any longer view – and then back, to where he’d come from. Immediately behind him was a wall of steam, thousands of metres high, where the flow had reached the sea and stopped, trans-substantiated into drops of pure wet heat. The sight was astonishing, majestical. 

Gordon had long been comfortable with a feeling of being at one with his adored underwater world, and in a way that encompassed a loss of ego, and a willingness to embrace a kind of nullification of self in service to a greater whole. It was his version of Zen. But in the face of Mother Nature popping a zit, as Alan described it? The sense of insignificance was belittling, not comforting.

And yet…

And yet, he’d beaten the bastard.

“Whoooohoooo!”

Both hands raised in the air, and yeah, that made his shoulders scream, but hell’s yeah. He’d made it. If only Buddy and Ellie had been here to film that epic jump off the cliff- yeah, that was a once in a lifetime opportunity missed. 

Now to let the world know how real legends played with volcanoes.

“Thunderbird Five? Two? Anyone? Could use a lift, here.”


	13. Half an Hour

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last one was short, so here's a bonus chapter.

There was silence in the cockpit. 

Scott removed his helmet as if he were a ninety year old, slowly and aimlessly, letting it drop from his fingers to the floor. Alan’s face – Virgil couldn’t look at Alan.

Instead, he stared at his controls, trying to make them make sense.

“Virgil.” John’s voice, somewhere remote, somewhere unreal. “Thunderbird Two.”

“Uh, yeah.” Virgil cleared his throat, tried again to focus, to stop his hands from shaking. Beyond the windshield the steam and ash swirled. Behind him, 103 people lived who should have died, and that should have meaning for him, that should be his priority. But a gigantic lassitude had taken over, and he sat with his hands on the controls and his mind in a fog to match the atmosphere outside.

“Virgil, you need to go. Those fighter jets could come by at any time, and these people need to get medical attention. We need to be doing what we can right now.”

“Yes. Understood.” But he didn’t, not really. He was aware that in a subterranean part of his being a maelstrom of guilt was building, but he could only sit helpless in its path. There would be time for its destruction to overtake him, and he knew it would be complete, but for now there was only inertia.

As slowly as Scott had done, he reached for his controls, and Two angled up and away, turning east.

_“Thunderbird Five? Two? Anyone? Could use a lift, here.”_

A second, two, three; then Scott was standing, yelling, when Virgil didn’t think he even had the strength to breathe, and Alan was shrieking and John was trying to cut through with a request for position that should have sounded restrained and professional but was nothing less than a burst of pure joy.

His hands had stopped shaking, and were turning his ‘bird back towards the peninsula without a moment of conscious thought.

“Shut the hell up!” Not protocol, not even remotely, but Virgil couldn’t care less just now, and his growl did manage to bring the volume to an abrupt halt. “Gordon, where are you?”

“Oh, hey Virge. Just taking the scenic route, ‘bout a klick off the coast, south of the main attraction. Everyone okay up there? Scott?”

“Yes, everyone’s fine.” Suddenly his throat was tight; he had to swallow, hard, before going on. “John, you got his bio-feed?”

“I do indeed. Sending location now.”

A small dot glowed on his console, and with it the world righted itself once more. One little burst of light to join 273 others.

Alan was out of his seat and at the lift before anyone could begin to coordinate rescue plans.

“I’ll get him.”

“Probably the best idea,” John agreed, and Virgil knew that he and John were both constructing detours around Scott, now sitting with his head in his hands, clearly spent in a way that neither one had seen before. “Go easy. EOS is telling me he’s not quite as okay as he’s making out.”

The last part of John’s sentence was spoken to empty space. Alan was already descending to the belly of Two, from where he could launch himself down to the black sea and the irrepressible small human now lifting all of them into the stratosphere.

Virgil brought Two to a halt directly above the site John identified. The sound of hydraulics; the increased roar of the volcano’s eruption suddenly given access as the belly of his bird opened; a long, long pause, time to let Virgil’s brain come back from the wasteland it had briefly abandoned itself to.

“We should send those two down into the hold, see what they can do with the worst affected.”

“Agreed. S2s for the scalds, at least.”

Site-specific analgesics, S2s were instant and remarkable in their effects on people in pain. That, and the enriched oxygen in the module, would begin to work wonders.

“Here first,” said Scott, voice pure gravel, and no one argued. When existence and annihilation had been so cursorily summoned as by this volcano they needed proof that the one had triumphed over the other. John and Virgil both needed to see Gordon alive and whole again.

Virgil wasn’t sure what Scott needed.

Except maybe a kick in the ass for being so clearly and fundamentally _not fit for service_.

And then two golden heads appeared above the floor as the lift rose, and Gordon was raising his arms in triumph, the absolute and utter little shit that he was.

“Oh man, you should have seen me. Straight off that deck, Acapulco diving at its best.” He dropped one arm around Alan’s neck, who was looking at him with the kind of hearts-eyes that belonged in anime, not the control deck of a Thunderbird.

But Virgil couldn’t find it in him to blame. Abruptly, he released the controls to auto pilot, swung in his seat, stood and took three long strides to where the youngest of them were waiting with water still beading on their suits and smiles the size of Kansas on their faces.

“Next time,” he began, trying to make it threatening but failing dismally. “Next time – no, forget it, there will be no next time. Do not do that ever again.”

Gordon cocked his head.

“Jump off a cliff?”

“Is that what you did? For crying out –why would you do that?”

“Burny cloud, Virgil. Scary burny cloud. Had two choices; carbonised on the ledge or going for gold off the top.”

“Why didn’t you go into the tunnel?”

At that, Gordon sobered slightly.

“Just no room. No time. Honestly, Virge, I wasn’t going for the money-shot. I really didn’t have an option up there.”

The thought of that was more than Virgil needed to hear just then. It was already banked in his screaming-meemies folder for 0300 hours. So to drown it out he took the last stride and wrapped both of them in a hug that had Gordon wincing and Alan clinging like a love starved limpet.

“And you’re going to tell me about that when we get home,” Virgil murmured into Gordon’s ear.

“What?”

For emphasis, Virgil squeezed slightly again and Gordon winced.

“Yeah.” He allowed himself a two second glare of pure frustrated love, then pulled back. “Alright, time to clear my space. Alan, Gordon. I want you both down in the module administering S2s to those that need them. Alan, collect them from the sickbay and make sure this guy takes 200mg of ibuprofen on the way through.”

“Sure thing. Maybe we should start decontamination too? A lot of them were exposed to that gas, would really help their breathing.”

Virgil nodded approvingly. “Good thinking.”

“Scott?” Gordon was looking past him, concerned. “You okay?”

“He’s fine. Nothing that an ass-kicking won’t fix.” Before Gordon could ask, Virgil said, “Go.”

The two of them gave mirror image cheeky waves as they descended again in the lift. Once they were gone, Virgil turned to Scott, who lifted one hand in a tired attempt to forestall what was clearly coming. But Virgil had no intention of indulging in anything quite so satisfying so quickly. A full recrimination episode, with slide show and slow-mo replay, would come when they were all safely back on Tracy Island. This? This was simply stating how it was going to be.

“You. When that lift comes back, you’re in sickbay. No arguments.”

Scott shook his head.

“I’m alright. Just a – “

“Don’t.” If the tone didn’t do it, the raised finger did. “Not a word.” He pointed to where the lift was once again waiting. “Now.”

For a moment he thought Scott was really going to resist him; but then he put one hand on either side of the chair and tried to get up.

And failed.

He dropped back after making less than a quarter of a rise, and the intense effort it took for Virgil not to let loose his righteous anger was remarkable. Pity no one would ever give him credit for it, but he could pat himself on the back, even if Scott would never know how close he came to being bellowed at.

“I’ll carry you down there if I have to.”

That earned a glower, but since it was coming from a man incapable of getting out of a seat, it lacked something in effectiveness. Virgil extended his hand; Scott took it; between them they got him up and shuffling to the lift.

“I mean it, Scott. Sleep.”

And the faint nod of acknowledgement would do him, for now.

As would the gathering night outside the window, and John’s expression of dry amusement as he watched Virgil retake his seat and the controls.

“Quite a rescue,” he said.

Virgil grunted.

“What that moron was doing out there…”

“Which one?”

That drew a snort.  
“John? You have any idea what happened with Kayo and Scott these last few?”

“No.” John’s expression grew serious. “I should have advised against Scott coming along. His bio-feeds were poor.”

Virgil let that sit there for a while, as the night thickened around him. Umnak was drawing closer, and the thought of putting these people down somewhere safe and warm gave him a moment of genuine pleasure that he reckoned on enjoying as a counter to the sheer misery that had engulfed him just minutes before. He looked ahead, mentally, to reunions and hugs and laughter. The best part of any rescue, and with these kinds of numbers, bound to be a beauty.

But there was something else to be addressed here, and in the end, he did.

“So why didn’t you?”

John gave him the kind of clear-eyed look that Virgil relied on more than he would ever say.

“Because I second-guessed myself.”

Virgil nodded.

“Any particular reason?”

John grimaced.

“Because - I can’t read Scott just now.”

And that landed with a truth so precise and powerful that Virgil felt it in his bones.

That was it, wasn’t it? And he could identify the beginning of it, all those weeks ago, when Hamartia told them they were observed, measured. Betrayed. Ever since, Scott had been walled off from them. An automaton performing his duties, a smile in place as and when required, duty done, and none of the messy, warm, irritable reality that was the brother he knew and loved.

“No.” He gave a long sigh, the release of emotions that were complex and corrosive. “I guess I can’t, either. He looked tired, but when he said he was coming, I should have asked him more.” He thought of something. “Have you heard from Kayo?”

“Yes. EOS is tracking her, and she checked in three hours ago. She’s fine.”

“Really want to know what happened,” Virgil murmured. 

“You and me both.”

There was worry, and then there was the ever-demanding now. With the lightest shudder, Virgil left the future and the past and brought himself to the immediate task of dropping down into the snow storm currently blanketing much of the central Aleutian Islands.

“Well, we’re back. Guess it’s time to see what the good folk of Umnak have been doing in the – do you realise it’s been just on half an hour since we left?”

John chuckled. “The relativity of time.”

“Half an hour. One hundred and three people. One hundred and four,” Virgil corrected himself. “That’s not a bad way to fill a half hour.”


	14. Tastes like Strawberries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alan's education continues, and a happy reunion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How wonderful is it to see so many new fics appearing after SOS? Thanks, Rob Hoegee.

The inside of the module revealed a tangled mess of bodies. Many were simply lying where they had stumbled or crawled into the refuge. Alan stopped on entry and sent Gordon an enquiring look.

“Find the quiet ones who aren’t moving,” Gordon said evenly.

Education was a movable feast as far as Alan was concerned. In the lift, Gordon was fizzing, riding an adrenaline high; already, Alan saw that he was stamping that down as best he could, reining in his own joy at survival in the face of suffering. It was something to recognise and think about for Alan’s evolution as a rescuer, the way Gordon brought his own emotional state down in order to meet the needs of the people they were rescuing.

Alan nodded and set off. It was a difficult idea to convey, perhaps, because it came from such a contrary base; people in pain were always a dreadful thing. But Alan couldn’t help but love the fact that the S2s brought such instant relief that he got the privilege of watching faces twisted or strained or frozen in stress almost immediately melt into relief like bliss. He wouldn’t have been the kind of boy he was if the moment didn’t bring such pleasure.

Patiently and steadily he worked through the crowd, occasionally pausing to meet up with Gordon and re-supply him with new canisters to insert in the second hypodermic and then continue down the lines of prostate rescuees.

A cry.

Alan swung his head around.

A woman – he recognised her from the initial ledge, someone upright and stern – was struggling to her feet, and calling out towards Gordon.

Alan hurried over, unsure of what was happening.

“Izvini, izvini.”

He didn’t understand what she was saying, but her face, one he would have thought severe, was suddenly flooded with the kind of happiness that caught at his own heart. It transformed her into someone much younger than he’d thought, someone beautiful with purpose.

“Galina!”

Gordon was embracing her, and Alan knew that this, this moment right here, was everything International Rescue lived for. 

Well, that and the awesome.

“I’m okay, I’m okay.”

Tears were falling from Galina’s eyes, but she was so transparently joyous that Alan fell just a little in love.

Anyone that happy to see his brother deserved it.

“I thought you were dead.”

“Ha! Me too. Dived – “ and Gordon, the dork, demonstrated with his arm – “ into the sea.”

“Idivyitelnyi!”

Another voice from the floor, rasping and weak.

“Chuvak…”

“Yuri!” Gordon was kneeling beside two of the young men, quickly assessing them, then looking up at Alan. “We need to decontaminate these guys, Al. Let’s get that happening.”

“Yeah, sure.” Alan stepped over the supine figures to the back of the module, to where one of Jeff Tracy’s insisted upon inclusions waited.

Jeff and Brains had both been acutely aware of the possibility of exposure to toxic chemicals on a rescue. A lesser man might have rested his hope and his ego in the quality of his own uniform designs, prepared to assert the superiority of his work above all demands upon it. Though all great inventors needed imagination, the one thing that most differentiated Jeff Tracy from his competitors was his empathy; his imagination combined with the essential and unwavering concern he had for the people who were going to be operating his creations. The thought came to him, very early in the process, of helmets off, unforeseen containment dangers, unexpected contaminant leakages, and the unacceptable cost of each. In every module, a hidden compartment at the back expanded to include five decontamination chambers; small cubicles, brilliantly designed, that neutralised anything untoward on clothes, on skin, and even in lungs and stomachs. The de-activating agent was not invented by Tracy Industries, but Jeff Tracy identified and acquired it, immediately releasing the patent to the world but also instilling it as a matter of urgency in every IR craft.

Access to decontamination also operated as an essential aspect of rescue work when the prospect of spreading toxic chemicals while going about a rescue remained.

Alan hit the panel that opened the chambers up for access. Five small cubicles propelled forward from behind their sheltering panels, lit with green and bright white lights. Every Russian nearby pulled back.

“Nyet,” one muttered.

“It’s okay,” Aland said, brightly. “This gets rid of the volcanic gas. It will make you feel better.”

It was an odd feeling to watch people he was trying to help physically recoil from him. It was far beyond his known experience of the world to understand what might have people so frightened of unknown technology. The thought was an ugly one, and vaguely frightening, so in characteristic fashion he pushed it aside.

Gordon and Galina joined him, Galina leaning heavily on Gordon’s arm as she wheezed for breath.

“Galina, these are decontamination chambers.” Gordon released her arm, holding her instead by her forearms. “We need people to get in here. They’ll help a huge amount with breathing”

Galina nodded. “Always trust. Of course. I will go in.” She kicked out a foot. “And so will these two. Yuri. Arkasha.”

“Wait.” Two small blond heads had caught Alan’s eye. “We need the kids in first.”

“Good call. Galina? You and these two, and the children. Their lungs will need this.”

Gordon brought Galina to the first chamber, then nodded to Alan. He’d go and get the kids. Alan bent to lift Yuri, with his friend Arkady helping as best he could, given his own debilitated state.

It was all going in a straightforward way, Alan thought, until he glanced up and saw the deep scepticism if not outright fear on every face watching them.

“Uh – you know? Maybe I should go first? Decontaminate my suit.”

He tapped at his chest. Someone in the crowd called out.

“You have helmet.”

“Oh. Yeah. Guess I do. Okay.” With a quick twist, the helmet was freed and his head bared. “Okay?”

No response, but he felt all eyes upon him.

He gave a quick, wide grin, and opened up the first chamber. On closing, he heard the soft musical chimes that heralded the gas release, and the a swirl of pink was around him, soft and warm, working with the most utterly deceptive efficiency to deconstruct and absorb all the chemicals that had attached to his suit and skin. In fact, the repellent quality of the suit and his limited exposure meant he barely needed it; but the truth was, he always kind of liked it. It tasted like strawberries. And its sweet softness was a balm after the last ten minutes of his life.

In thirty seconds it was done. The light flashed green again, and he stopped out.

“See? It’s really nice.” Wisps of pink ghosted up from his shoulders, but he was pleased to see that the expressions surrounding him were more intrigued than fearful now.

Gordon was waiting with the two small children, each one tucked onto a hip and wheezing pitifully, with a young woman close in behind him.

“Hey Al. Say hello to Minka and Sasha. And this is their mum, Sorya.”

“No,” Galina said. “She is their sister. Their parents – they did not make it from Moscow.”

“Ohhh, no wonder,” Gordon turned eyes full of sympathy to the young woman. “Sorya, you’re doing a real good job with these two. Now we’re going to make them feel a lot better. Okay?”

She clearly didn’t understand his words, but the message was conveyed. She said something in a low voice to the children, who after a pause, nodded.

One child was put into the chamber Alan had just left, the other, without a murmur of complaint, into the one beside it. Yuri and Arkady took the next, Galina the last.

A new satisfaction, watching the lights change, seeing the doors slide back and five people who had entered struggling for breath coming back out upright, lungs cleared, the mortal fear finally gone from their faces. Clothes stiff with ash now hung clean and limp, warm again in their colour.

Galina called out, and people began climbing to their feet, coming forward.

“This is very good. Your technology is impressive.” 

“Most of it is down to that genius I mentioned,” Gordon said.

“Give him my thanks. For all of us.”

Three lots of five survivors had gone through the decontamination units by the time Alan felt Thunderbird Two drop height and speed, aiming for Umnak, and each round brought the same feeling of achievement. This rescue had been all kinds of horrible, but he began, in the back of his mind, to catch that feeling of excited triumph that Gordon had shown in the cockpit. In spite of all the danger and obstacles, it seemed like this was going to be one of International Rescue’s most glorious days after all.

He was about to say something to that effect to Gordon when he noticed his brother sway forward, both hands coming to his knees. Under his helmet, his normally tanned face looked a shade whiter.

“Uh-oh. Looks like you just got your adrenaline crash.”

“Me? Nah. This is my pretzel imitation.”

“You want a wall?”

“Wall would be good.”

The only spare space in Alan’s immediate sight was beside the large man with the suitcase, so he steered Gordon over to him and let him slide down on legs clearly wobbling.

“Whoo. Haven’t had one of these for a while.” Gordon dropped his head back against the bulkhead of the module. “Just goes to show how truly awesome that dive was.”

“Big deal. You went for a swim.” Alan grinned down at him. “Some of us were busy doing the stuff we’re supposed to be doing.”

“ _Dive_ and swim. From off the top of a volcano.” He shook his head, slowly. “Should have been a camera there.”

The man beside him ignored everything Gordon said. He was slowly pulling pages of handwritten Cyrillic text from within his jacket, old papers that looked sere and strange in the harshness of the module lights, scrutinising each as if they held secrets he already knew but needed to affirm in the face of their near destruction. Gordon rolled his gaze towards them.

“Huh. Cool. Russian writing. Last time I saw writing like that was in a freaky submerged laboratory full of dead Russians.”

The man stilled. He didn’t look at Gordon, but the slow turning stopped. His dark gaze narrowed; then he continued his reading, nothing else escaping from him to confirm what Alan instinctively knew.

Saying that out loud was a mistake.

“Yeah, okay,” Alan said as loudly as he could. Several people stared at him in surprise. “So Galina, the people already here will need decontamination too. Maybe get everyone ready to swap over? There’s a hangar where the others are waiting. Super cold out there, so we need to get everyone into shelter soon as we can, bring the others in here. Oh, but tell the ones already decontaminated not to touch the others yet.”

“We will do this,” said Yuri, his usual level of energy if not restored at least evident as keeping him going for now. He said something to Arkady and the two of them began leading people towards the front of the module.

Thunderbird Two came to a gentle halt, the module lowered to the ground, and it was as if every inhabitant of it let out a kind of sigh. 

They were on the ground. They did not know what they would see when they opened the access hatch and stepped out, but the earth beneath their feet would not be shaking, and the skies above their heads would not be hunting.

For that, there would be gratitude for the rest of their lives.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chuvak – dude  
> Izvini - sorry  
> Idivyitelnyi - wonderful


	15. And What It All Means

She was not alone in the dark.

Parker, a kind of primordial constant in her life, piloted FAB1. Sherbert was tucked against her chest, snoring softly in the way she found endearing in its trust. Both gave her comfort, both reassured her connection to something beyond herself.

And yet.

The skies were clear for the first hour of the flight, the gibbous moon cold and bright. But then clouds began gathering about them as they sped towards Umnak, bringing what support she could to the Tracy boys as they battled a volcano and the obtuse politics of malicious men and women. The outside closed about her, and her thoughts circled back towards the quiet, insistent anxiety that had underscored her life for the last months.

Penelope’s involvement with International Rescue, and the Tracy family itself, was longstanding and many-layered. As their London agent her work was invaluable in helping to navigate the arcane waters of global manoeuvrings, the shifting patterns of alliance and bloc that whirled beneath the seemingly steady surface of the World Council. She doubted if any of them appreciated how much work was done to keep International Rescue a viable organisation in a world where suspicion and corruption still lurked, but it was work for which she was uniquely equipped and a task she took on gladly. International Rescue were too important to let slide into the internecine mess that could swallow them and deny their life-saving mission.

Beyond that of her agenting work, there was the fact that the Tracys were, for her, the closest thing she had ever experienced of a robust and warm family life. Their inclusion of her, their easy acceptance and welcome into a select community that had perforce kept others at arms distance was a source of not just pleasure but pride. In her lowest moments, the ones that tapped on her psyche’s shoulder at 0300 hours, when she felt small and besieged, the Tracy family love gave her a perspective that boosted her every time. She doubted she would ever tell them just what their ridiculous, wonderful embrace meant to her, but she acknowledged it to herself.

And then there was Gordon. And if ridiculousness was part of the Tracy world, then surely Gordon was the fount of much of that. The fact that a deeper connection had somehow struggled into being continued to surprise her. It shouldn’t; he was a dear man, full of love and courage and kindness, and anyone would be happy to have such devotion in their life. The surprise was not so much that she had fallen for him as the unexpected way she had wilfully put aside her cynicism, her cold analytical impulses, and allowed her own warmth to meet his.

In this long night, speeding towards the Aleutian Islands, she searched for that warmth to bolster herself against the other truth that had been a part of her existence ever since Hamartia had casually described the situation on Tracy Island and announced the obvious correlative; someone or something was spying on the family.

For the first time in almost seven years, Penelope knew herself to be an outsider.

No one had said anything. No, Tracys did noble like other wealthy families did greed; it was part of them, and the thought of turning on her as a knee-jerk reaction would be anathema to them. It wasn’t in anything anyone had said, probably wasn’t even in their conscious thoughts. And yet, being who she was, a creature of politics and positioning and pragmatism, she knew that to an analyst she was the first and obvious weak link.

This woman, this Hamartia, was corrosive.

She saw it on John’s face. People found him hard to read at times, but she had always thought him rather transparent. There was a tension in him now that had not existed before. Where once he was clear and calm there was a film of wariness across his eyes, at the corner of his mouth. 

Scott, too; it was burning through him. Where John was cool, Scott was fire, and the effort of keeping that rage and hurt and existential fear banked was so apparent to her that she wondered how the rest of the family didn’t see it. Or if they saw it, and shared it, and talked about it in a way they wouldn’t with her. The outsider.

She shifted uneasily at the thought, and Sherbert whuffed his displeasure, still asleep.

“How much further, Parker?”

“Five minutes, m’lady.”

“Good.” She summoned brightness. “I’m quite looking forward to seeing Adele and Igasiẋ again. It’s been ages. Not since the wedding. And now they’re expecting. Oh.” 

“M’lady?”

“Did you pack that little gift basket for them?”

“H’under the front seat.”

“Thank you, Parker. I can always rely on you.”

His dark eyes lifted up to the rear-view mirror. Usually she would find a smile in their depths, but tonight, there was nothing but seriousness.

“I would always ‘ope so, m’lady.”

He can see it, she thought. Of course he can.

International Rescue needed her help in a way that she was specifically equipped to offer, and so far, she’d failed as miserably as possible. Hamartia was a ghost; untraceable, unknowable, and somehow reaching tentacles deep into the heart of this family she loved. And for every day that that woman was out there, waiting, holding them in her grasp, she was eroding something unique and wonderful and precious. All of this, as Penelope flailed ineffectively and felt her own place in that special world slipping away.

Enough. Self-pity was not something she ever indulged in – at least, consciously – and this was skating perilously close to it. There were much larger concerns here, many lives in the balance, and her own insecurities could be carefully packed away into the tightly locked cabinet of her heart until a future time when she could bring them out and do battle in her own way.

And she had, after all, just pulled off something quite spectacularly brilliant with Grandma Tracy.

“’Ere we are then. Blimey. Not much of a welcome mat.”

Penelope peered down at the landing strip, and agreed. A single light glowed outside a large hangar; dotted across the nearby landscape were small strips of light leaking past window curtains. Apart from that, the bulk of Thunderbird Two was almost indiscernible through the swirling snow, the module tucked beneath it only faintly lit by one small light source over the access hatch.

“No point in announcing our presence here anymore than we can help.”

“No, m’lady.”

Parker brought FAB1 to a close stop by the hangar. Penelope found the briskness that was her own form of self-support.

“Right then. Supplies inside, and let’s see how things stand.”

The wind was brutal as she tucked Sherbert into her coat against her chest, lifted a pallet of nutrition supplies and stepped out into the night. A few steps through rapidly gathering snow, and she found herself kicking the door as a knock – not dignified, perhaps, but effective. The door opened and Virgil stood there, his face breaking into a smile when he saw her.

“Lady Penelope!”

Genuine, whole-hearted welcome there, and Penelope knew if she ever saw in Virgil’s eyes he shadows that haunted John and Scott, something in her would die forever.  
“Let me take that.” Virgil reached for the pallet, and as he did so, he caught sight of Sherbert, barely visible above Penelope’s lapels.

“Uh – are those earbuds?”

“Hmm? Oh, yes. Bertie does like his music. Vivaldi in the Home Counties, but he quite enjoys Stockhausen on longer flights. Can’t imagine why, I can’t stand the man or his music, but there it is.” She gestured behind her. “There’s more in the car, if you’d – “

“Of course. Alan, come on.”

Alan joined his brother and the two trotted to FAB1 where Parker was handling three pallets on his own.

Penelope looked around, brushing the snow off her shoulders as she did so. Sherbert struggled free and dropped to the floor, one dirty with mingled ash and snow. Deftly she removed the earbuds and let him wander off. The base of the hangar was packed with people close together, finding warmth and comfort under the harsh overhead lighting. It was immediately clear that bedding was in short supply; almost half the people she could see were huddling together on the bare concrete.

Her eyes scanned the room, looking for someone else, realising as she did so that her need was suddenly so strong it was all she could do not to cry out for him.

“Ploppy!”

Ah, yes. Adele was a dear girl, but the nickname was one of the more unfortunate remnants of a schoolgirl relationship.

“Pickle. It’s been so long! You’re looking marvellous.”

A swift, crushing hug, and Penelope leaned into it more than she meant to, lingering for that second longer than manners and custom dictated. She felt Adele’s hesitation, and knew the scrutiny she would receive when she pulled back.

“Takes a fucking volcano to get you to come and visit us.”

“I know. I’ve just been so busy. But it is good to see you.”

“Mmm.” Adele was doing it, giving her a third degree within a single glance. “Well, I’ll say this for you, Plop, you’ve got a better class of friends these days.”

“Do you include yourself in that?”

Adele gave a soft roar, the closest she came to a quiet laugh. Her vivid red hair swung back in its ponytail.

“My god, yes. These boys have been amazing. And bloody hell, they’re pretty. Where have you been hiding them? Which one’s yours? I bet big and dark out there.”

“Oh, I keep them all in my string,” Penelope said lightly. “Where’s Igasiẋ? How is she?”

“Back home. We’ve got thirty there, all the children and parents. Got the old ones bunked down with my people in their homes.” For a moment the ebullience left Adele. “When I think of those kiddies out there – I mean, not just with this bell-end volcano, I mean living there, Kamchatka – what these people have been through…”

“I know.”

“And Iggy is doing marvellously. Seven months, can you believe it? She still wants to take the first tour in three weeks’ time.”

“What did you say to that?”

“Ha. We’ll see.” As they talked, Adele led her away from the nearest group of survivors, then lowered her voice. “So – you’re worried. I’m taking it there’s no plan yet about where they go from here? You know they’re welcome to stay as long as they need, but logistics – “

“Oh, no, no. I think we may have something.”

“You do?” Adele looked surprised. “Then why do I feel like my Plop-Girl is shaky on it?”

Damn her.

“Long story. But yes, I think I might have done something quite clever.”

“There she is,” said Adele, grinning. 

The door opened, and three people walked in. One was a striking looking woman who Penelope immediately registered and marked as she categorised any dangerous creature; the aura of formidable will entered with her. The other was a brown haired young man, eager-eyed and restless. And the third –

He saw her at once, his head lifting up as if sensing her presence, reacting as copper to a spark; and she saw how the sun came up in the middle of a midnight snowstorm.

It was everything she needed. One last, small part of her, the one that always looked to protect her, told her that she was about to reveal more than she safely could.

And she acknowledged and ignored that as she left Adele and ran straight to him, into his arms and his helpless happiness. His body melded around hers, and the heat of him and her body’s sudden, overwhelming response left her pressing against and into him.

“Well, well,” she heard Adele murmur behind her.

“Penelope,” he breathed into her hair. “Pen.”

She said nothing for several long, glorious seconds, just breathing him in and feeling him do the same with her.

The way he held on to her told her everything she needed to know about this rescue. It had been a tough one. She pulled back at last and looked searchingly into his eyes.

“Did you get them all?”

His weary but genuine smile answered her.

“Yep. We have officially broken the International Rescue record. Two hundred and seventy three, no one left behind. Except me.”

“You?”

“Don’t ask,” said Virgil, shouldering past with pallets of supplies to dump them against the wall.

Gordon looked about him.

“So. Umnak. We were talking about an island getaway, but I gotta tell you, Pen – this wasn’t what I had in mind.”

She matched his tone – light and playful, in a cold and dirty hangar crowded with refugees.

“That’s quite demanding of you.”

“I know, I know. Still…”

“Perhaps next time we need to specify cabanas, daiquiris and tropical sunsets. Without ticking the erupting volcano extra option.”

“Deal.” He blew out his breath. “I don’t know what we’re going to do now, though.”

“You and me both.” Virgil came back to stand beside them, obviously considering their state of grace in greeting had gone on long enough. “We’ve only shifted the immediate problem.”

“Virgil, what you’ve done here is fly in the faces of the World Council, the GDF and Kirill Putin. Quite literally.”

“Can’t say I’m sorry.” Gordon lifted his chin, and Penelope reached for his hand, squeezing it.

“Oh no, darling. Don’t misunderstand. I’ve never been more proud.”

“Well, at least everyone’s fine. Scott’s so fine he’s snoring in the sick bay.”

She frowned, as far as she ever did. “That doesn’t sound at all like Scott.”

“No. I guess. He just – I don’t think he should have come.”

“I know he shouldn’t,” Virgil growled.

“Huh. Yeah. But you know Scott. And if he hadn’t come – god, Pen, if he hadn’t been here half these people wouldn’t be, either.”

She took a moment to let her eyes scan the room, seeing the way family and friends huddled together, listening to the soft murmurs of conversation that may have been silenced forever under the terrible effects of a volcanic eruption.

“Quite a confronting thought, isn’t it?”

She caught it, then; something dark and unsettled in Gordon’s face.

“I don’t even have to imagine. It was so close. I mean, look at them. They’re just people, with lives and dreams and… and they were just left there. They were left to whatever would happen to them. How can anyone be so uncaring? About human beings?”

She shook her head. “Far be it from me to call you naïve, darling, but none of this is anything new.”

He pulled away from her then, his fists balled.  
“I know. I get it. I’ve worked in the military before, I know about decisions based on policy that stinks to high heaven. It’s not that I don’t understand this is the way it is – it’s just that I don’t get _why_. I don’t. I can’t understand how someone can – well, look at them. That couple. They’re just trying to live their lives and how can anyone else get to stand anywhere else and say this is not going to happen? How? God, it’s just – so wrong, and I can’t deal with that. I can’t make excuses or give reasons because bottom line it’s just fucking wrong.”

His vehemence was so unlike his usual demeanour that it caught her breath.

Oh yes, there were things she needed to find out about this rescue.

But she said nothing for several moments. It was the least respect she owed this revelation of his wholly decent heart.

“I don’t know either. I do know that what you and your brothers do is the best of us.”

He waved that away, but she caught at his hand again.

“Add your light to the sum of light. That’s what you do, what we all do. Save one life and you save the world.”

“Guess we did that 273 times over today, then. That’s something.”

“That’s everything.”

He nodded, but his eyes tracked the floor, and the smile he tried to find was pitiful in its resemblance to his usual beam.

Leaving that travesty in place was no part of her self-appointed task tonight.

“You said you were left behind? I’m sorry, but there’s no way that’s not utterly terrifying to even consider.”

He looked up, rueful, penitent.

“Yeah. This was a close one. And I can’t regret it – because seriously, Pen, awesome, wait till I tell you about it… but…” He blew out his breath, softly, his fingers twisting over in hers to hold her more tightly. “I was just out there, with Virgil and Yuri, just thinking back over it all and it hit me. Slapped upside the head, and then I saw you, and I realised, really saw that…” He swallowed, head shaking slightly. “I almost lost you.”

“But I’ve not been in any danger?”

A long pause, so unusual for him, and she looked up. He was staring down at her, his eyes almost boring into her, almost reaching between their bodies in a physical act of claim.

“It’s not just me anymore. It’s you, too. I’m figuring this out, but – it will always be you, too.”

There was one long, slow moment while her brain insisted on parsing this, insisted on turning it, and opening it, and pulling apart every possible strand of it in order to deny the simple truth he gave her.

Something bigger, something deeper, something infinitely braver and wiser and eternally young finally stepped forward and did the real work.

_This is love._

This is the loss of one into two, and the greater realisation of the one as it subsumed itself into the other. This was the most complete declaration of love she could ever imagine, and it came not with champagne and roses but coughing refugees and dirty snow and a sweet Russian lullaby, crooned to tired children in matching sweaters who watched them both with eyes wide and uncomprehending.

“I’m sorry, Pen.” His head dropped again, blond and bright, bowed but only to take up the yoke once more. “But now I know that if it all goes wrong, it’s not just me that pays the price. And the thought of hurting you – I don’t know if I…”

Her fingers tightened in his, as a thousand insecurities rattled their cages in a mazurka of the mind.

“You don’t know if you can keep doing this and keep me, too?”

He gave a bemused frown that gradually evolved into a smile. Not one of his brightest but real nonetheless.

“Pen? Seriously?”

“Seriously what?”

“Do you think for a second that you would ever lose that one? Not even close.” He pulled her in tight again, and this time she made the kind of sound that was too raw, too honest, for her to ever be comfortable making. Yet it was impossible, unthinkable, that she didn’t.

“Always you. Just so you know.”

A hand landed on her shoulder and she almost yelped.

“Alright, you two. Times a-wasting. What’s your plan, Ploppy?”

Ah. Old friends.

Sometimes one really wanted to simply shoot them.


	16. Educating Alan

Alan slid himself inside the small office at the end of the hangar. It was a cramped fit; him, Gordon, Virgil standing, Galina, Adele and Lady Penelope seated. At least Sherbert was busy elsewhere, delighting Minka and Sasha as he sat on their laps in turn and accepted their rough but sincere petting with the dignity that comes to all blue-blooded aristocrats prepared to sell their status for a little heat on a cold night.

Penelope set her compact down on the table and John’s avatar appeared.

“All’s well, John?”

“Flight’s just left Yellowknife for Wekweèti.”

“I know that means something to someone,” Gordon said brightly.

“It certainly does,” said Penelope, equally brightly. “We have a plan. That is, Grandma Tracy and I have come up with what we believe might be a marvellous solution.” Penelope paused, and Alan watched as she worked the room. It was almost instinctive for her to do so, even when she had a captive audience and no competing claims to the floor.

“Anderson Holdings just bought a diamond mine.”

“Anderson Holdings?” Virgil had spent a summer working as an intern in Tracy Industries; some names stuck. “Isn’t that the one Lee Taylor and Dad started back in – “

“In 2056, yes. It so happens that there is a mine that has just closed down in in the Northwest Territories, near Nunavut. And when I say just, the last miner flew out yesterday. The company has not yet begun to dismantle the huts, or pick up the generator, the vehicles and so on. There are beds but no bedding; a commissary, entertainment building, laundry facilities, not to mention running water and sewage system.”

“So,” said Gordon, slowly. “A kind of village?”

“Absolutely. Everything one would want to survive in one place, and a remote one at that. The mine is not paying, so the workers were brought out and the company was in the process of selling off every asset they could and transporting anything else. Your grandmother and I thought Anderson Holdings should go into a little speculative mining.” She paused, letting her bombshell gain momentum. “And my dear friend in Ottawa agreed. We have 273 miners coming in on temporary work visas under the Remote Workers Act, courtesy of one dear and rather besotted man in the mining and resources department of the Canadian government.”

“Besotted?’ said Gordon, eyebrow rising.

“Not now, dear.”

“Do they know that some of these 273 miners are less than five years old?”

“I don’t know where you get that notion from, Virgil. The information I have sent to Ottawa for processing holds no one under 25.”

Gordon was grinning now.

“Sasha? Minka?”

“Remarkably experienced mining engineers, if I’m not mistaken.”

“A completely self-sustaining village. Remote. Covered by work visas. Safe from any likely passer-by.” Virgil gave a low whistle. “I’ve heard of some schemes before, but his one – and Grandma’s in on it?”

“It was her idea. You know how often mining companies fail. She thought we should look for one that was ending up in the near future, or had packed up in the last month or so. We couldn’t quite believe our luck when we found one that was literally in the process of moving people out. In time, perhaps six months, they can all apply for immigration. I have it on good authority that no questions will be asked.”

There was a general, self-satisfied chuckle; but then Alan noticed Galina, standing with utter stillness in the middle of the room, her arms tight around her midriff, and he realised that what for them was a puzzle and a challenge to be overcome was, for her, the last in a long chain of moments that defined whether or not she and her people got to live.

“Can this be done?”

Penelope seemed to catch it too.

“Yes. Galina, I believe we can do this. That flight we mentioned is one chartered by Anderson Holdings to take supplies up to Wekweèti as we speak. Then, in a day or two, that plane will land here and the first load of people to go to their new homes will take off. Galina,” and Lady Penelope bent forward, warm and persuasive. “This is not particularly fancy accommodation. But it will be warm and dry, and safe. There are cabins to accommodate over 400 people, so there will be more than enough room for everyone.”

Galina shook her head, slowly.

“This – you cannot know what it has been like. If this is true – “

Alan was no longer surprised that she turned instinctively to Gordon. He figured dancing on a rock ledge under a volcanic eruption kinda bonded two people.

“Can this be true?”

Gordon came to her, and then dropped to one knee to be at her level.

“Galina, if Penelope says it’s true, then you can stick that in the bank. Er, I mean – I trust her with my life. Yes, it’s true.”

“Nothing’s ever certain.” Penelope’s words sounded like the wrong thing to say, and yet Alan understood, dimly, that Galina would be won by brutal honesty, no matter how cold, rather than the kind of bullshit that might flatter a lesser person. “But to the very best of my knowledge, everything is in place to make this work. I think,” and she astonished Alan by leaning forward and taking Galina’s hands in hers, “I think, my dear, you can trust in this. I think you can let go for just a little.”

There was silence for several long seconds; and then Galina gave a kind of groan that sounded as if it were coming from beneath the now-still and quiet earth.

Penelope immediately wrapped her in a hug; and of all the things that Alan had not expected today, that was probably one of them. Especially when he saw Galina’s hands come up and grip tight to Penelope’s shoulders. If anyone had asked him, he’d have said these two had been eyeing each like cats in a cage – and here they were, hugging it out like besties.

“Huh. Women,” he said to no one in particular. 

Virgil clipped the back of his head.

“When you have earned an ounce of the respect due to these two, then you can comment. In the meantime – “

“Ow. Yes?”

“In the meantime, I think we should go.” Until Virgil said it, Alan had not realised how much he wanted to hear the words. It had been amazing; terrifying, awful, so tense his shoulders still felt like they were forged into immovable steel, but until this second he hadn’t realised how utterly draining it had all been, too. The thought of Tracy island – away from all this tension and fear, away from the cold and the dirt and the memory of Gordon gone and Scott broken – it almost made him high five Virgil. The look in Virgil’s eye persuaded him that perhaps that was not a good move. “We don’t want to be here in the morning when the satellite rolls around.”

“Ah – about that,” said John, attempting penitence but only achieving a poorly concealed excitement at his lawlessness. “I may have asked EOS to loop the last week on the satellite feed.”

“Johnny!” Predictably, Gordon was delighted. “You outlaw, you.”

Virgil raised an eyebrow.

“This has all been one big slippery slope, hasn’t it?”

“It will buy us time,” John said, heavily patient. “Give us deniability.”

“You know John, I find your forays into skulduggery quite endearing.” Penelope smiled sweetly at him. “Does this work for you, Adele?”

Adele shrugged. “We’re good for as long as you need us, Plop, you know that.”

“Plop?” Alan mouthed. Penelope quelled him with a look.

“Thank you, Pickle.”

“Pickle?” Gordon echoed Alan.

“Adele – dill – really, I don’t see why we are wasting time on nonsense. Virgil, I think you should go. You’ve done a simply marvellous job.” She paused, then continued. “I counselled against this mission. I was wrong.”

Virgil gave her a tired smile. “You were right in everything except the one thing that mattered.” He reached out and gave her a quick, one-armed hug. “And you and Grandma win the prize for finding us a solution after all the dramatics.”

“Go. Get some rest. I’ll stay here.”

“Really?” Gordon frowned. “Don’t you have some thing you were supposed to be at tomorrow?”

“Cynthia Rycroft’s engagement party. But that hardly matters in comparison.”

“Cynthia Rycroft? Wow.” Alan’s eyes widened. “You know some seriously famous people, Lady Penelope.”

“Yes, and there’ll be some serious media there. Who will notice if you’re not. Pen, this is about Colonel Casey. If anyone comes sniffing after us for this, we’ve got to make her job as easy as it can be in making a case for the defence. If you’re being fabulous at an engagement party, that’s one less thing that anyone could try and make something of.”

“I agree,” said Virgil. “There’s no evidence if John is dealing with the satellite. It will be little details that will give us away. The Russians already have us in the area, but that’s as much as they’ve got. I think we should all be very visibly somewhere else tomorrow, as early as we can make it.”

Penelope stilled, then nodded. “Of course, you’re right. Oh dear. Is it terrible of me that on some level I was glad of an excuse not to go to that tiresome woman’s party? But of course I will. I’ll leave with you now.” 

“Thanks, Penelope. Adele, we’ll leave the module – you’ll need the extra accommodation space.”

“What if the Russians decide to fly over for a look?” Adele was clearly not worried by the notion – Alan suspected she would be as likely to take pot-shots at any unwary Russian fighter jet who dared – but it was a worthwhile question. “Just on spec? They’ll see a big green craft sitting on the tarmac that wasn’t there before. And one that is quite clearly an International Rescue beastie.”

Gordon grimaced. “Are they likely to?”

“No, Adele’s right. We cover every base – plausible deniability.” Virgil looked at them all. “Any ideas?”

“Just one,” said Adele promptly. “About fifty gallons of red paint. Leftover from the hangar roof.”

“Red?” 

“Well, I say red. More of an orange really. Anchorage Amber, I think they call it.”

“ _Orange_?!”

“Marvellous stuff. Very weatherproof.” She gave a wicked little shrug. “I’ll have everyone who can hold a brush out there before sunrise. Any Russians fly over they’ll see an orange container on the ground, nothing more.”

Alan wondered if he’d ever before seen someone spontaneously combust while asphyxiating himself sat the same time. Gordon patted Virgil’s arm.

“It’s okay, Virge. I’ve been meaning to suggest a colour update. Think of it as a trial run towards a happier you.” He smiled helpfully in a way calculated to be anything but.

With a visible effort, Virgil took up the mantle of adult once more.

“Galina? You’ve got a friend with us. You need anything, get in touch.”

“Thank you.” That sudden light came back into her eyes, and she sent it to each of them in turn. “So when we are Canadians we will invite you to our new home and teach you the Russian way of celebrations.”

“Much vodka,” said Virgil gravely.

“Much vodka. Much kvass. Many pirozhkis. Music. Dancing.”

“And no volcanoes.”

“No volcanoes.” Then she squeezed past Alan to reach Gordon. “Thank you.”

He shook his head.

“Just have a great new life up there in the north. Make friends with a polar bear. Or, you know, don’t, they’re not really very good at the whole hospitality thing.”

Somehow they all shuffled and switched and then Alan was out of the steamy little office and tiptoeing past sleeping people, shapeless under space blankets and rugs and sleeping bags. They reached the small group where Sherbert had managed to get himself neatly tucked between the children, clearly so comfortable he barely opened an eye as Penelope huffed at him.

“Well, really. You would throw me over for a warm spot next to two woolly sweaters?”

It appeared all too sadly true.

“Never mind, Pen,” said Gordon. “I’d need at least another sweater before I’d consider it.”

Penelope gently extricated a grumpy Bertie and then Parker was waiting by the door, ushering them into the darkness. But as they stepped out, the wind died. The howling that had been a constant background noise, one of rattle and threat, was suddenly and utterly gone, leaving a muteness so complete that it felt as though the violent world had finally ceased its wildness and fallen into slumber itself. As far as they could see everything was white and soft and clean.

They could even see the moon.

“Won’t need the lights on going home,” murmured Gordon, gazing upwards. There was something rapt in his expression, even as the last of the snowflakes settled lazily on his upturned, helmet-less head.

For Alan, the moon’s cold light was even better. 

“Hi John,” he called, waving. 

Virgil looked about him, hands on hips, a soft smile on his face, the smallest of nods. Alan knew that look on his big brother. It meant job well done. People safe. And most fundamentally of all – all the Tracy family, including Lady Penelope and Parker, were going home in one piece.

Virgil became aware of Alan’s scrutiny, and promptly scowled before grunting and stomping towards his ‘bird.

“Home. Food. Sleep. Come on, you two. See you soon Lady Penelope, Parker.”

Gordon stayed back for what was no doubt a disgusting PDA of vomitous proportions, so Alan hurried after Virgil.

“Hey, Virgil? I was thinking… one day we should come back here. Do the whole caldera tour thing. Just think, you can get right down to the steam vents. Might even be able to camp down there, right next to the heat. What do you think?”

Which was how Alan came to learn some startling gerunds of particular obscenity he had never even suspected of existing before.

Education came in all kinds of places.   
 


	17. Midnight

Virgil stood by Scott’s bed in Two’s sickbay.

This close, and able to examine Scott’s face without any chance of dissembling on his part, Virgil could see tight little lines still collecting around Scott’s mouth and eyes, despite his unconsciousness. He saw the greyness that robbed him of his usual vigour.

He saw his brother, naked of pretence, and was deeply unhappy at what that revealed.

Whatever had happened prior to this mission, it was merely the latest twist in an unfolding spool of pressure and doubt and the gradual unravelling of everything Scott believed in.  
With a sigh he detached the bunk from the sickbay dock, the hover-mode engaged. He was able to direct the bed one-handed, with Scott completely undisturbed upon it, down through the hold and into Tracy Island’s sickbay, where the bed was re-connected to the wall and the transition from craft to land was complete. Gently he lifted a physically unnecessary but psychologically powerful light blanket across his brother’s sleeping body. The fact that Scott had not moved at all throughout the whole process told Virgil everything he needed to know about his brother’s state of exhaustion.

A lot of healing to be done here. But perhaps, just perhaps, the Kamchatka rescue might be the beginning of it.

He straightened up, flexing his shoulders, feeling the strain of the day bunch and pull and then disperse.

Damn, but he was hungry.

He climbed up to the kitchen, now brightly lit, where Grandma beamed approval at all her boys even as Alan manoeuvred her away from the freezer and Gordon did a sneaky end-run behind her to forage for something edible. He gave a shriek of triumph.

“Happy Hopburgers! We’ve got some frozen Happy Hopburgers!”

“Now, I was thinking I would make some good old-fashioned soup.” Grandma was making a valiant attempt, but Virgil had the sense even she knew it was a losing cause.

“Grandma, your soup is so my second favourite watery thing,” Gordon said solemnly.

“Ha. Thanks, I think.”

“But Hopburgers,” Alan hoisted himself onto the bench. “They’re awesome.”

Gordon caught sight of Virgil.

“Hopburger, Virge?”

“Sure.” He came to stand by the bench, comfortable in plaid and jeans, just allowing himself this small moment of peace and banality. It was almost midnight after all. A time when the world grew a little loose around the edges, when smiles grew sloppy with fatigue and the body recalled the efforts of the day in the sure knowledge of near sleep. “Three if you got ‘em. With extra cheese and ketchup.”

“”Course. Al?”

“Special raspberry sauce.”

“Grandma?”

She waved him away. “I ate at a civilised time.”

“Okay. That’s six Hopburgers. And mine – “ Gordon backed out of the fridge with a truly startling array of condiments and additions – “ with jalapeños, pineapple, chillies, tomato, cheese, carrot, beetroot and onion. Oh, and pickle.”

Even Virgil had to give that list the moment of respect it deserved.

“I have a mental image of the interior of your stomach as something Breughel would have recoiled from as being too over the top.”

“Breughel? He a good chef?”

“One of the best.”

“I’m gonna call this the Kam-Chat Special. Just need a super shot of vodka to wash the whole thing down.”

“Sorry, Gordon. We’re on call, remember?”

“Oh yeah. That.” A grin that told Virgil he’d not forgotten for a second, and that messing with Virgil’s orderly mind was almost always among Gordon’s first orders of business. 

“Just feed me. I’ve earned it.” By putting up with your extraordinary levels of bullshit went unsaid, and Gordon’s little sideways smile towards him conveyed his understanding of that. Yeah, they all knew what had gone down today, and just how harrowing it had been. Virgil framed it in terms of hearing the worst; Gordon framed it in being under the worst, and they both had room to acknowledge the particular scarification of each chamber of horror. 

Groaning theatrically, Virgil sat at the table.

“Just give me food, and then I am going to sleep for at least as many hours as John can manage to hide every single rescue emergency that may or might decide to happen.”

“Food I can do.” Gordon slid him a plate with instant heated burger plus cheese and Virgil regarded it as if it was indeed something heaven sent given his level of gnawing hunger.

“Gordon, it’s not often I say it- in fact, I think looking back I have never said it before, and I seriously doubt I will ever say it again, but you may actually be a force for good after – “  
“International Rescue.”

John’s voice. But John’s voice filtered through granite, through chop, through goo and storm and the worst kind of ugly.

John’s voice when he didn’t want to be offering it.

Never good.

“Thunderbird Fi – “

“I have Hamartia.”

Alan was almost comical in the way his hand stopped as he piled cheese onto his burger, letting the cheddar slide crazily off the tongs to land on the bench and then fall through to the floor. Almost. There was nothing funny in watching a teenager get gut kicked at a distance, in watching his face morph from relaxed enjoyment to utter, devastating fear.

“Hamartia.” And this, one part of Virgil’s mind noted, was fascinating, the way Gordon almost danced upright, chest out, eyes firing. “Fucking Hamartia. John? What have you got?”

Because he didn’t feel that way. That combative. That ready. Gordon was on his toes, a prize fighter shaping up, and he was – god, he was falling, backwards, denying, helpless.  
He was lying on the floor of Two, paralysed.

“Can you get everyone in the control room?” John said, evenly.

“Yeah. Sure.” Gordon, energised, angry, filling the room with his will to fight. He reached for the comm. “Yeah, Brains? You awake? We need you up here. Virgil? We need to wake Scott.”

Of course. Of course, wake Scott. Scott needed to be here for this, he needed to hear what the woman had to say, he needed…

No. No, fuck that. He needed to rest.

“Scott stays where he is,” and he snarled the words. “What does she want, John?”

John’s avatar frowned. “Are you sure we shouldn’t – “

“What does she want?” And he wasn’t equipped, he knew that, but there were first causes and first principles, and one of them was that he protected his brothers. Scott was not fit for this. Virgil would stand for this, in the face of whatever she was bringing, and he would answer for it. But Scott would rest, because Scott had been burning himself to the point of self-obliteration, and now he was unconscious and someone needed to step up to protect him for a few hours.

“I have her here. She’s requesting access to our comms but I think she can actually access it anyway.”

Virgil gestured. “Invite her. Let’s see what she has to say.”

John gave him a look – measured, restrained, deeply sad – then patched her through.

And there she was. In the weeks since his ordeal she had grown in his mind to something monstrous. A genius, a punisher, a strategist and spymaster and tormentor, and yet here she was, an infinitely ordinary looking woman.

The deceptive nature of that was apparent almost immediately.

“I don’t fit your mental image, do I, Virgil. How could someone so mundane be quite so beyond your comprehension? It rather upsets your world view, doesn’t it? I bet you’ve been fitting me with all kinds of superpowers to justify your rather complete and utter defeat. The male ego is so utterly weak. And the male imagination is utterly predictable. You have the mental capacity of a gerbil. Mind if I call you Gerbil from now on?”

Gordon pushed forward, and Virgil wanted him to stop, to stay back, keep hidden.

“What do you want?” 

“Oh. Jellyfish. You survived. My surprise is matched only by my pleasure. I find your level of enthusiastic stupidity rather delightful.”

“And I find your need to run your mouth kinda revealing. People I knew who knew they were the best? Never needed the verbal fireworks.”

The woman smiled, unfazed.

“A jellyfish with pretension towards a cuttlefish. Bravo, little invertebrate. Now, when you have stopped flexing your gelatinous nonsense, the grown-ups have a word or two to exchange.”

Virgil straightened up.

“I’ll repeat what my brother asked, which, all due respects, is the only sensible thing said so far. What do you want?”

“I don’t want anything, because I have everything. I’d be embarrassed for you, except for the fact that I understand that you don’t have any real sense of how this world works and so you simply don’t understand. But I agree, brevity is the soul of wit, and more to the point, the soul of expedience. International Rescue now belongs to me. Anything and everything you now do is only at my behest, and I will decide exactly what will be parlayed against any rescue expenses incurred.”

Grandma Tracy stepped forward as Brains came hurriedly into the control area, buttoning a jacket over pyjamas.

“You are a vile woman. I know you think you are very superior to my family. But I am here to tell you that – “

“Oh please, can we get the old folks home here on 911? No? Senile emergency? Sweetie, I almost respect the fact that you are old and have presumably survived multiple forays against your life on the grounds of boredom alone, but just sit the fuck down. You are irrelevant here.”

Virgil heard Alan gasp, saw Gordon move to stand beside him, grab him.

“Don’t worry for Grandma, Al,” he said, loudly. “This moron hasn’t got a clue who she just tried to insult. Bit like a feather hitting concrete, you ask me.”

“Oh, Jelly. How sweet. If I regarded any one of you as any kind of competition I would savour this, but the brutal fact is I don’t. You are employees, as of this moment. Speaking of, there’s my new chief scientist. Hello again, Brains.”

Brains glared at her as if he had the power to eviscerate her through his glasses alone.

In the background, John’s avatar was working busily, obviously trying to trace her call. She sent a short glance towards him, equally clearly unbothered by his efforts.

“Delightful, or tedious? Can’t say. But John, here’s the situation. You work with data, I believe. Alright. Data. International Rescue just snatched 273 people from Kamchatka Peninsula under a volcano and what, sadly but incontrovertibly, is more dangerous - Kirill Putin’s nose. You took them to Umnak Island.”

In the seconds that followed, Virgil found himself swallowing silence like a solid thing, something that blocked his ability to think, to speak, to act. As if his life was a cliff and it was simply falling away, shard by shard, chunk by chunk, as he stood there, immobile. Useless.

“You’re crazy.” Gordon, still fighting, and he’d find it in him to admire the fact if he wasn’t so completely gutted.

“Feisty but predictable. Do shut up. Come on, Virgil, I don’t have all day. Accede to my demand to control of IR and we can all get some sleep. I’m sure you need it after your heroics under Maly-K.” The woman turned her gaze towards him, and he knew that of course she knew who was most senior, of course she knew everything about International Rescue and the Tracy family.

There was a traitor in their midst.

He wasn’t fit for this. He didn’t do these kind of word games, this kind of mental sparring. Scott was the strategist, Scott and John, and with the thought came an idea.

“I can’t.”

“Too much for you?”

“No.” This was surer ground, and Virgil stretched his toes back and dug in. “Scott is under medication. I can’t bring him out for another hour at least. And I can’t make that call without his input.”

“An hour? You’d make me wait an hour?” The woman pouted, and even as she did so Virgil saw that it was a parody of a parody. This woman had her mind already set. All of this was pantomime, nothing more. “Fact is, there are two darling children in two darling sweaters – red and yellow, just in case you think my ever-busy informant is stinting on details – and I am of a mind to wander over tomorrow morning and wipe them all out with a - shall we call it a gas explosion? Yes, a gas explosion, that works. I think I shall rather enjoy watching a large group of people who thought they had been plucked from their deaths’ grasp suddenly offered proof to the contrary. Not before I send all the details about how IR – naughty IR, really Virgil, so irresponsible – actually went to Kamchatka and pulled these people out of a volcano’s way. I believe you’re under probation? From everyone who matters? So news of an unsanctioned mission – oh dear. I believe that would be the end of International Rescue. Rather comprehensively.”

“Why?” His voice was hoarse with the effort to corral his emotions.

“Because having such an efficient team at my beck and call suits me. You’re not smart, god knows, but you’re competent. Do you know how rare that is?”

“We’ll never work for you,” said Alan, his voice low and full of utter hatred. “You don’t get who we are. We will never work for you.”

“A speaking embryo. Will wonders never yadda yadda. Do stop, little creature, you genuinely don’t know how far out-matched you are in your ability to summon coherent thought and I don’t have the time or inclination to teach you.”

Scott rode his anger like an untamed jet blast, propelling him to extraordinary heights. Kayo simmered in hers, a thermal source of power that maintained her mind and body long after both should have surrendered. But Virgil – 

Virgil experienced anger like standing at Ground Zero. Aware only of the power that burst out and around him, flattening everything, leaving nothing but devastation. Anger immobilised him.

Options. He needed options.

Nothing came to mind, except the one he’d already played.

“I can’t agree to anything until Scott is here.”

“You really do have balls the size of a gerbil’s, don’t you?” She seemed mildly amused. “An hour? We’ll be heading to Umnak, so I suppose I can give you that. The fact is I am rather looking forward to watching that little peacock of a brother of yours beg. And then submit. There really is no way out from under this one, Gerbil.”

Her avatar disappeared.

Virgil became aware of Alan, eyes huge with tears of anger and despair. Grandma, Gordon. John. All of them staring at him with such shock and dire need, and he had nothing to give them. Nothing.

“We need to call the GDF,” Alan was pleading. “Send them to Umnak. We have to protect them!”

"The minute we do that we have an international fracas on our hands.”

“Who cares, John? They’ll still be alive!”

“For how long?” Virgil could hear how much John despised being a devil’s advocate at this moment, but he was grateful. It gave him time to think. “Once Putin knows what has happened, he will move heaven and earth to get them back. The World Council will have no grounds for refusing a Russian evacuation. You’d be condemning them all to prison or worse. Or he could even take Hamartia’s option, just send planes to wipe them out. He could do that in the time it takes for the World Council to convene to discuss things.”

“We can’t do nothing!”

“I agree. We will call the GDF as a last option, if we have to, to stop Hamartia’s attack tomorrow.”

“Then we need to go back.” Virgil’s heart answered in an immediate affirmative to Gordon’s passionate demand, but Brains shook his head.

“We have to assume Hamartia is monitoring us somehow. The minute we leave here, she can contact the GDF herself. We’d be intercepted before we got halfway there.”

“She might, she might not. I don’t care if IR goes under – we can’t leave those people there!”

Virgil raised a hand. “I hear you, Gordon. But there might be a way we can do this without losing everything else, too.”

Gordon spun on his heels, arms wrapped around his body, agitated. Alan had his face hidden in his fisted hands, trying hard to stay strong but clearly overwhelmed.

“I agree.” Grandma looked at him, her faith clear in every line of her face. “You’ve got this, kiddo.”

And if ever Virgil, a man for whom honesty was a wellspring of purpose, wanted to believe a comforting lie it was right now. But his doubts were climbing alongside his fear, and all he heard was _not good enough, not good enough._

And that was an indulgence no one could afford, not least the people gathered at Qaluun and relying on them.

The hell with that. He wasn’t a strategist, not like Scott, but he wasn’t a coward and he wasn’t a fool.

“Virgil, maybe I better go and wake Scott?”

A hesitation. The desire to just say yes please and hand it all over was strong. But something else was stronger.

Options? He’d give them options.

“No. we don’t have time to bring him up to speed. We’ve got this. John. John, we need – we need two pilots, two cargo planes, in the air from Fox Island in the next ten minutes.”

John busied himself at his screen.

“I have a list of all registered pilots on Fox Island. There are cargo plane services. But getting two pilots to run an unauthorised evac at midnight – “

“Money,” Gordon’s voice sounded as tight as Virgil’s. “Throw crazy money at them.”

“Wait.” Grandma said. “Wait. We need to think this through.”

“Grandma, there’s no time.”

“There’s always time to get it right.” Her certainty fell on them all like a balm, easing their collective tension just enough that Virgil felt a renewed strength. “Gordon, if we offer vast sums of money we are likely to buy pilots who will talk. Or at least, suddenly appear in an economically depressed island with unexplained wealth, enough to get people asking questions. John’s right. There are short term and long term results we need here. John, check the pilot registry – is there anyone on it who would be likely to do this as a humanitarian response?”

John’s eyes scanned his data.

“There’s one. Dusty Yevgenev. He’s the ex-mayor. Very involved in local charities and so on.”

“Alright then. Now, no one is going to do something no questions asked, particularly not something like this, without getting some benefit. What is Fox Island’s most pressing need just now?”

Alan almost wailed. “We’re doing an economics lesson?”

“We’re doing reconnaissance,” Grandma said, firmly. “Finding out what we have, what we can use.”

“Their main industry was almost destroyed by Hurricane Belinda 15 months ago,” John said. “A seaweed extraction and processing plant. There’s been difficulty getting funding to repair it, get it started again, and that’s had a huge effect on the community. And they are trying to raise funds for a new hospital – the old one is seriously out of date.”

“Good.” Grandma became brisk. “Fifty million for a new hospital. Whatever it takes to get the processing plant up and running. Let’s see if that can get Mr Yevgenev and a like-minded friend out of bed and flying.”

“And,” Gordon added, “tell them there’s a bonus $20 million to share across the island if no one hears diddly squat about this flight for the next 12 months.”

“Not bad. On it.” John disappeared to make the call.

“Okay. Okay. What else.” Virgil swung around to stare out at the soft Pacific night.

“We need to contact Galina. Get her people ready.”

It sounded right, but Virgil paused.

“What if we can’t get pilots?“

“They need to know!”

How the hell did Scott do this? A thousand thoughts were tumbling through Virgil’s mind, and all too many of them were images of big-eyed Russian children, standing helpless under falling ash, being obliterated by explosion.

“Yes. Yeah, Grandma, we need to – “

But he saw she was already seated at the comm console, making the call.

A long, horrible wait as it connected, as they knew that IR was about to kick-start the next nightmare.

“Yes?” Adele’s voice came through, strong and sure despite the hour. “Unexpected call from you, International Rescue. What’s up?”

“Adele, it’s Sally Tracy here. I have bad news. The evacuation has been monitored by a ruthless criminal who is threatening to attack the island tomorrow morning.”

Silence. The sympathy Virgil felt for the woman on the other end of the phone was almost crippling.

“We’re going to be attacked? The Russians?”

“That is a possibility, if she shares what she knows.”

“Who the hell is – never mind.” In his mind’s eye Virgil saw her high cheek bones, her full mouth, her clear grey eyes, and he knew Adele would rise to this challenge as she’d risen to so many others. “Alright. We have tents, enough for the weakest to be safe if we de-camp down the valley, but with these conditions it’s going to - well. If we have to, we have to. We’ll need to move now.”

“Wait. We’re trying to organise another evacuation.”

“An evac? How? Who have you got?”

“No one yet. We’re trying to get someone from Fox Island, a Mr Yevgenev?”

“Dusty?” She sounded startled but pleased. “Holy shit. Yeah, that mad bastard, he might do it. Him and Kat, she’d be up for it. So we’d use Gray Goose Cargo, go where?”

“To the place we discussed. Let’s keep those details off air.”

That was an admission, right there, and Virgil knew Adele was too shrewd not to miss it.

“Oh dear. This bitch is something.”

“You said a mouthful,” said Grandma.

“Alright. I’ll go and get everyone up and ready. They’ve got nothing to bring, so shouldn’t take long. And from what I’ve seen of our guests, they’ll be up for another fight.”

“Yes, they will.” Virgil kept his voice as calm and low as he could, offering her whatever strength he had. “I’m really sorry about this, Adele.”

“Don’t see that you’ve done anything except try to save people, Virgil. Save your apologies for Penelope – I think she was trying to get some sleep going home. I presume she’s across all this?”

“Not – not yet.” He knew this wouldn’t be well-received, but he went ahead anyway. “And we’re keeping this on a need to know basis, for now.”

Another silence, and Virgil imagined he heard a certain frostiness in it. 

“I see.”

“Virgil?” And of course Gordon was going to be all over this. “Why the hell wouldn’t we tell Penelope?”

“Because we’re putting nothing out over the air that could be collected as evidence against us. And because…”

“Because what? We’ve got a leak? You can’t be serious!”

“International Rescue,” and John’s avatar cut in just as Gordon began towards Virgil, anger in every line of his body. “We have a deal. Dusty Yevgenev and his partner Kat are flying down to Umnak, no questions asked. Their planes are fusion engines so no fuelling needed. He says they can be in the air in ten. They’ll be on Umnak within the hour.”

“Adele? Did you get that?”

“Yes I did, and thank fuckety-fuck for those two. Right. I have work to do.”

The call disconnected.

Virgil blew out his breath.

“Have we done it? Are we missing anything? Grandma? Gordon? Brains?”

They stared at him – blindsided, wrong-footed, but there, fighting – and one by one they shook their head.

“If we can get them in the air and gone, by the time she says anything – there’s no proof.” Gordon’s mouth locked into a grim line. “And once they get to Canada, they’re safe.”

“And we might even be able to save International Rescue too.” Brains pushed his glasses back up on his face. “Quite a gamble, Virgil.”

“So what do we do now?” Alan tried to match Gordon’s expression, and Virgil loved him for the attempt. 

“We wait. She’s coming back in an hour and we need to stall. Let Gray Goose Cargo get into Canadian airspace as far as it can before we tip our hand.”

“We wait. Ugh.” Alan threw himself down onto a bench seat. “I hate waiting.”

“You and me both, Al.”

“Alright.” Grandma was firm. “I know of three young men who need to eat. This is going to be a long night. And you need your strength. Gordon, bring that dinner in here and I want every scrap eaten. No arguments.”

Gordon lingered, his eyes still on Virgil, and there was damage done this night that had to be attended to at some point, Virgil knew. Nothing he could spare any thought to now, but it hurt, the way he felt accusation and betrayal emanating from a young brother whose essential kindness was a lodestone in his own life. But at last Gordon reluctantly turned and went towards where their abandoned meals lay on the bench tops in the kitchen.

He wanted to ask. _Did I do okay? Was I wrong to leave Scott out of it? Are we making the right call?_

But he knew he wouldn’t. He knew that this was the sacrifice at the heart of leadership. His own need for affirmation could lie unattended and he would take the burden gladly if it meant that the night ended well for strangers who meant so much more to him than his own peace of mind.

It was nearly forty minutes later when John suddenly reappeared and said, eyes lit with a glow of atavistic approval, “The geese are full and flying,” that he realised his hands had clenched until they bled.

"Yesss," breathed Gordon. "Go Dusty and Kat."

And then nothing to be done but wait some more.

The hour came, and passed.

No one said anything for several minutes, as time ticked on and the tension slowly twisted higher.

“Where the fu – for goodness sake is she?” Gordon muttered.

“I don’t care if she never shows up again.” Alan spoke through his bent arm, covering his face as he lay full length on the bench seat.

“Keep your enemies close,” said Brains. “I would p-prefer to know what she was doing, frankly.”

Virgil drifted over to his piano, sat there, his hands resting on the keys, playing ghost tunes in his mind.

Another ten minutes. Twenty.

“She’s playing with us,” Gordon said. “This is deliberate.”

“Yes, I think it might be.” Grandma looked tired but defiant as she sat at the comms console. “Virgil, are you going to wake Scott?”

Virgil thought of him, lying asleep in the sickbay, and tried to imagine his absolute fury when he discovered that he had not been summoned. For something like this, something that affected the fundamental existence of International Rescue – would he regard being sidelined as betrayal? Yes, of course he would, and it might well mean that Virgil would be without the support of two of his brothers by morning. Worse; he may well have fundamentally corroded their relationship. He was versed enough in human nature to know that ties of blood and experience couldn’t always overcome decisions made, actions taken.

And yet.

Something deep in his gut told him that Scott was already compromised. That bringing him to this would be both dangerous for the mission and deleterious to Scott himself. He couldn’t make an argument for it. But he knew it. He knew that to call Scott would not be an act of inclusion but of moral cowardice. And he knew that Scott, in his current state, would not be a good addition to the mix. It would sound disloyal, perhaps, but he knew it wasn’t.

There were more sacrifices to be made tonight, blood ones from the still-beating heart, and it was very possible that no one else would ever appreciate them, but they were Virgil’s to offer.

“No.”

Another dark look from Gordon, but Virgil stayed quiet and still. This was the easy part. The hard part was just about to come.

On cue, John reappeared.

“I have her,” he said simply, his voice as cold and dead as space itself.

Hamartia was there. Invading their home as she’d invaded their minds and spirits for all these weeks.

“Alright. Your rather transparent ploy has run its course. I presume you are ready to submit.”

At the piano, Virgil began picking out a tune one-handed. _Ashokan Farewell_. Something sad and sweet and melancholic, and for all that his fingers seemed to move without effort, the playing was delicate and meaningful.

“Come on, children. I am not going to indulge you any longer.”

Virgil was aware that everyone in the room was watching him. He ignored them, playing on, adding his other hand, filling the chords and letting the bittersweet nature of the song fill the room.

His heart was pounding so hard in his throat that he wondered if he would pass out, but the playing was good, and he hung onto that, his own personal zipline to the world even as he threw himself out into the void.

“Gerbil. As your boss, I need you to know that I don’t appreciate being ignored.”

Another chorus, and then Virgil spoke.

“No.”

“A useful monosyllable, but not in this context. No?”

“No.” He stopped playing, and looked at her. “Call the GDF. Call the World Council. Tell them what we did.”

She showed no reaction, and yet he had the sense that she was taken aback.

He also felt every pair of eyes in the room on him, and could only imagine what his family was thinking at that moment.

“Burning bridges? I suggest you reconsider that particular approach.”

“Oh, no. Let them all know. We did what we did. Tell them all.”

“How very extreme of you. Of course, this is easily done. I did expect that you would fight for International Rescue just a tad more. But perhaps I overestimated your altruism?”

A final flourish on the piano, an arpeggio that rose and fell and went nowhere but felt like the last piece of bravado he had in him.

“Oh, our altruism is fine. But we will never compromise International Rescue. We will all stop. Now. This second. We will never operate under your command, and if that means the end of International Rescue, well, it was something pretty damn fine while it lasted. And we’ll see it dead and buried before we see it corrupted. Sorry. You lose.”

It took everything he had in him to lift his eyes to meet hers, but he did it. 

“So, you know – fuck off. You and your information and your shitty little plans. Fuck off. International Rescue isn’t yours and never will be.”

She stared at him, emotionless. In the room it felt as though no one was breathing, but perhaps that was just him.

Time passed. Time stilled. He couldn’t say which.

At last, she spoke, and there was the faintest trace of amusement again on her face.

“Well. Gerbil. Who would have thought?” She pursed her lips, then nodded. “Alright. Yes. This time - this time, and only this time, I’ll blink.”

And she was gone.

For a moment no one said anything – and then everyone was saying something and nothing, and Alan was at Virgil’s side, overcome and unable to express himself except in flailing hands.

“Virgil! That was awesome!”

“Oh man,” Gordon breathed. “Wow. You so rock.”

“I knew you could do it,” said Grandma, smiling. Her hands were locked together, a kind of secular prayer.

Virgil himself sat there, stunned and more than a little overwhelmed. He looked over to where John was watching him, still working at his screen but nodding as if assured of something.

“John?”

“Oh, yeah. I’m coming down.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy Hopburgers feature in 'Keep It All the Year.' They're Gordon's charitable sideline.


	18. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ah - why Scott acted the way he did. And we're back where we started this part of the story.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has been un-betaed, because my lovely Soleil_Lumiere is being beaten up by her actual paid work. But she was always there, and alpha read, and I thank her, as always, for her enthusiasm and general fabulousness.

In the end it was almost twenty-two hours before John managed to set foot on Tracy Island. EOS had been insistent; usually, a return to Earth’s gravity necessitated a week-long adjustment of the gravity density in order to acclimatise John’s body to the demands of Gaia, and EOS insisted that at least 18 hours be devoted to gradually adjusting the weight on John’s body before he dropped quite so precipitously back to his home planet. He knew it would make a difference; he knew his desire to be with his brothers, now, was an emotionally based one and not something he could reasonably defend. Still, the wait was a chafing one, and when he finally docked and stepped out into a darkened landing area, he could feel the pressure of the extended hours of denial as crucially as he felt the pressure of the Earth’s weight, dragging each of his molecules down.

He stepped carefully up through the hangar and into the living area. All was quiet. The kitchen lights were dimmed; the outside lights darkened entirely. No one was taking late night laps of the pool. No one was savouring a late night snack. Tracy Island was asleep, to all intents and purposes, and he moved accordingly, with as much finesse as his Earth-clumsy body could manage.

Clouds of darkness. Blares of light. He stepped between them, wary.

As he approached the sector that included the comms console and central seating pit he sensed the lack of multiple people. Only one, sitting at their dad’s desk, as if that was a reliquary and he an acolyte.

“Scott.” John lowered himself into a bench seat with gratitude, letting his sinews lengthen, letting his bones settle.

“Hey, John.” Scott gave no indicator that his brother’s unscheduled arrival was anything but ordinary. “Good to see you.”

“It really isn’t. 

“No. I guess not.”

On his father’s desk sat two drinks. Scott lifted one hand towards them.

“Dry ginger. I know it helps your stomach when you come down.”

And wasn’t that so like Scott? Despite the pressing concerns that had brought John down from Five too fast, despite the deep-seated anxiety and fear that gnawed them both, Scott had taken the time to remember something as small as that. 

“Just finished talking to Igasiẋ.”

“How are they?”

“Enjoying themselves, apparently.” A dry chuckle, a ghost sound in the dim light. “Seems there’s a spot with thermal springs that sits about three kilometres from the airport. They usually take camping groups there for some glamping after doing the caldera hike. Trees, hot springs, all tucked away at the base of a small hill. So when the Russians left, Adele and Igasiẋ packed all their people up and headed for it, along with luxury tents – full heating - and food. They’re having their own mini-break.”

“They didn’t want to leave with the Russians?”

“No. And I agree with them. Business as usual works for us, if the GDF goes checking. But taking them away from the base was a good idea, too, just in case she had decided to attack.”

“Which she didn’t.”

“No.” The word was so weary that any emotional meaning was hidden. No, she didn’t and isn’t that great? No, she didn’t, and what the hell does that mean?

“Where is everyone? Bed?”

“Yep.”

“How’s Gordon?”

“Sore. He’ll be fine. Swam about a million laps, jumped in an ice bath and then the sauna and then did another million laps. Seemed to think that was the right thing to do.”  
The right thing to do. That was the question, wasn’t it. 

Reluctantly, John got to his feet again and collected his drink before returning to his bench seat and spreading out along it.

They sat in silence for several long minutes. The dry ginger ale was sharp and cool on his tongue. He focused on that as he waited for his thoughts to coalesce. Sometimes it felt as though his ability to think clearly was always slower to arrive on Earth than he was.

“Alright.” He began softly. “I guess I’ll go first. At what point are we going to talk about what just happened?”

Scott didn’t move. From where he sat, John couldn’t see his eyes.

“You mean saving 273 Russian people?”

“Saving a lot of people. Sure.”

“You’re not going to pretend this wasn’t all kinds of amazing?”

“So you really don’t want to talk about it.”

“Not a lot to talk about from where I sit.”

“Guessed as much. Come on. Scott.” John kept his voice even. “Of course Kamchatka was a great outcome. Let’s put that completely aside for several seconds. Let’s look at some other aspects of the mission that are irredeemably bad.”

“People are rescued that would otherwise have been-“

“You want to talk about the way you left Virgil dealing with a sub-par operator in the middle of the biggest rescue of his life?”

“I did my work. I got things done. You can’t – “

“No. Don’t. I get that I have responsibility here, but Scott. Please. Don’t make me fight for this.”

A long silence, so loaded that it felt like an extra weight on already burdened chest and shoulders.

“I may have been at less than my best, but we’ve all played injured. That’s the life. Don’t pretend you’ve always operated with your full complement of sleep.” 

John made a low sound in the back of his throat.

“You weren’t fit. And I went with it, even though I knew I should push back. And it get it, I made a bad call, but Scott? I trusted that you were offering me a genuine choice. I believed you when you said you were ready.”

Scott pulled his head back, further into the shadows.

“You want to abrogate yourself of every claim to a bad call? Is that what you want? Hey, John, get in line.”

“I don’t want to do anything but look at what we did and make sure we follow procedure and protocols, because frankly that’s not what happened and we need to be honest about that.”

“Are you sure this is not just you wanting to make me look like the bad guy?”

John was not aware previously that double-takes existed outside of cheesy movies and Gordon’s comedic attempts, but he found himself actually doing one now.

“Seriously? That’s what you think is going on here? Of course not.” He drew in a deliberate breath. “But the fact is, I’m struggling to make sense of the last few days. I don’t know why you volunteered so – emphatically. I don’t know why Virgil and I agreed to it. There’s a couple of decision making processes right there that deserve their own inquest alone.”  
Scott made a weary motion that John could only just see.

“I get it. Shouldn’t have gone. We’ve all made mistakes. Book it and let’s move on.”

“Oh, no. No, Scott. You don’t get to do that. Look.” Agitated now, John sat back up, ignoring the way his joints protested. “Here’s the deal. I need data. So does Brains. We’re both good at looking at what we’ve got, but what we’re both really, really good at is looking at the gaps. Scott, the fact that you think we should hand-wave this last week is frankly scary. At the least it suggests a misapprehension about how International Rescue should and does operate that is pretty damn big. If you think some heroic statement about saving lives can trump all need for accountability… that just doesn’t cut it. It can’t, because we just don’t work if we don’t pay attention to safety. You know that! First lesson Dad ever taught any of us, for crying out loud. And over the last – seven days? Ever since you went to Hungary with Kayo…”

“Hungary just didn’t work out, that’s all.”

“Scott. Please.”

Abruptly Scott pushed back from the desk and stalked over to the huge windows that formed both wall and ceiling of their control space.

“John, this woman is playing with us. I’m sitting here trying to figure out how the hell she knows what she does, and you’re worrying about something that is already done and dusted. My priorities are about keeping us safe in the future, not raking over what in the end turned out to be a clandestine mission that actually worked.”

“I want answers too.” John flexed his fingers, easing their ache. “But to get answers I need to know what I’m working with. Who I’m working with.”

“You know me.”

“Thought I did. Thought I was working with a professional who would never put his own ego ahead of the demands of the mission.”

“It wasn’t – “ Scott checked himself. “It wasn’t about ego.”

“Then what? You say you’re figuring everything out? Trying to outsmart Hamartia? Well, so am I. So’s EOS. We’ve been going over every scrap of information we have, every recording. We’ve run diagnostics to a state that would detect information units at a sub-atomic level, that’s how far we’re going, and there’s nothing there.”

Scott was silent. The dry ginger tasted like bile in John’s mouth.

“So the only conclusion supported by the data is that her intelligence is coming not via electronic means. It’s coming via some _one_. We have a leak. And so I am going to be looking at everything that has happened over this last week and ask, who is behaving out of character? Who is making bad calls? Who won’t give a straight answer about what he’s been doing?”

That earned a dry chuckle.

“You’ve got me pegged for this?”

John made a sound of pure exasperation.

“No. Of course not. I’ve got you pegged as an aberration, and that’s what I am looking at. It’s what you would look at, too, if you didn’t have some kind of martyr complex going on.”

In the quiet darkness the lights from the comms console glowed amber and red. International Rescue, offline. Running deep. And Scott, going deepest of all, and John couldn’t tell if he was hunting or hiding.

At last, he heard a sigh.

“Okay. You’re right. Hungary.”

 

“Hungary.”  
Scott left the window and came back to the central space, stepped down into the soft light of the pit and took a seat, squarely opposite John. He clasped his hands, his head down, eyes focused on something only he could see. “We thought we had a lead. Several leads. We stayed in a little hotel in Józsefváros, hearing that someone would contact us about the First Responders. Nothing for two days, then about 1600 on the third day Kayo got an invite for a meet. Just her. I was to wait at the hotel. I didn’t like it, but you know Kayo. And I trusted she’d be able to look after herself. Neither one of us wanted to jeopardise the contact, so we followed instructions.”

John watched him as he spoke. Scott always held himself in tight control; Gordon once said that Scott slouched in formation. It was true. It was as though Scott always held himself to a physical manifestation of his internal demands towards rectitude and integrity. But there was something beyond discipline here, something that spoke of rigidity and defence, and it came to John that seeing his brother like this hurt. Scott had decency running through his veins. He shouldn’t be sitting there like this, fighting for a foothold in his own home.

“I think it was after 2200 hours that five men just came slamming into my room. Before I knew what was happening they had me out and down in some cellar of the hotel. Where they proceeded to beat the crap out of me for the next three days.”

John’s mouth dropped open in horror.

“What..?”

“You’ll like this. Wasn’t some gang of kidnappers. Wasn’t the First Responders. Nope. It was the Hungarian state police who thought that Kayo and I were the First Responders themselves. So for three days they did everything they could to make me confess to the thing we were there investigating. I’d still be there now if Kayo hadn’t come back and basically handed them all their asses, individually and collectively. Apologies all round, someone made a mistake, some data was corrupted in their files to include a photo of me as a wanted man… yeah,” he said, looking at the way John’s eyes kindled at that. “Oh yeah. Hamartia in a big way, I’m thinking. It’s all just a game to her, John, just some sick game. I guess she thought that particular ploy was hilarious.”

“But…” John’s bewilderment matched the shock he felt. “Your bio feeds, your tracker – nothing indicated anything was wrong.”

“Oh. Yes. Forget to mention. First thing they did – grabbed my arm and slapped a disk onto my watch. Don’t forget, Hamartia had access to all our systems, she knows how our bio feeds work. My guess? She was sitting at the Hungarian state police HQ, fake ID, fake authority, and supplied them with a nifty little gadget that neutralised my feed. You’ll probably find a brief adrenaline spike and then normal readings for the entire three days.”

“I was monitoring Kayo. I thought she was the one at risk. God, Scott, I remember noticing you hadn’t left the hotel, I was thinking you were catching a break.”

“Not your fault. I’ve seen the logs. You had Kayo to worry about, plus five rescues while I was supposedly sitting around working the mini-bar. You weren’t to know.”

“But I should have!” It was the cry of the thwarted panopticon, and even as he said it, John knew it to be illogical, and worse, born of a kind of unacknowledged hubris. He wanted to be all-seeing and all-knowing, because it meant he could keep his family safe. The fundamental flaw in that reasoning would be embarrassing for any decent communications officer, least of all someone who worked so hard to discipline his mind.

The look Scott gave him told him his brother knew exactly what was going through his head.

John cleared his throat.

“Scott, I’m so sorry you went through that. That kind of interrogation – it can have a terrible impact on people. You should have told us.”

Scott nodded.

“I know. I know. God, I know that. Getting out of that room, Kayo just about carrying me, it was like – like I didn’t know who I was any more.” His voice was so soft now John could barely hear him. “I sat in the back of Shadow and couldn’t remember my own name. Couldn’t stop shaking, not for an hour or more. Days of no sleep, constant pain, and these absurd, crazy questions that made no sense but just wouldn’t – wouldn’t stop.”

John wanted to go over to him, comfort him, but the fragility of everything in this moment meant he didn’t dare to move. He wished Virgil was here. 

Scott looked up, finally, his eyes still obscured by the angle of the lights. “I came in and heard what was going on and the only thing I could think of was that I wanted – I had to get back to being me. A rescue sounded like a godsend. I didn’t even think the situation through. I don’t think I even paid attention to the details, to what I was arguing for. I committed us to something that was dangerous, that could have destroyed us, that nearly killed – “ 

His voice choked at that, the words simply impossible to air.

“Gordon’s fine.” 

“Yeah.” Scott’s mouth twisted. “I’m sitting here trying to make sense of it all. Trying to - to weigh it up. I mean, a lot of lives saved. Just numbers makes it great, but I saw these people, John, I talked to them. I know a little of what we would have lost, what the world would have lost, if we hadn’t made that call. I can never regret that. Just – never. And then I start to think about the fact that Virgil could have been shot out of the sky, that Gordon did a sixty foot dive to escape a pyroclastic flow. And then, because this is the kind of reckoning that has layers on layers, I think about the fact that my call could have meant the end of International Rescue because I could have truly, royally fucked our probation with WASP and the GDF and the World Council. Hell, who doesn’t have us on probation these days? The Scouting Association could have come knocking with demands at this stage.”

“I didn’t know.” John leant forward. “Scott, we didn’t know. You needed to tell us.”

“I know that. Now.”

“And you didn’t know that then because you were damaged.”

Predictably, Scott’s head shot up at that.

“I am not damaged.”

“Yes, you were. Yes, you almost certainly are. Interrogation, torture – come on, Scott, if it was one of your pilots in the Bereznik campaign, what would you have done? If they’d come back from interrogation, how would you have acted for them?”

Nothing from Scott for that. Where the light transected his face John saw his lips twist into a grimace. 

“I can cope.”

“Yes. I truly believe that. You’re one of the strongest people I know, mentally. But no one brushes this kind of thing off, Scott, no one. And you know this.”

“Yeah.” Soft, and lifeless. “Yeah, I know.”

John looked down at his glass. This was the kind of friable data that tormented his mind, information that came with caveats and fine print and shadings, nuance, all the imprecisions of the human heart. To the best of his understanding, to process it was to destroy it in the very act, even as he acknowledged that Virgil and Gordon both had ways of taking this rat’s nest of feeling and opinion and fact and speculation and somehow making it resolve into something workable.

He felt hopelessly outmatched.

But whatever he felt was nothing to the pain that was currently crucifying the brother he loved. An attempt had to be made, however inadequate, because no one else was here and Scott Tracy deserved absolution. Even if what he would be offered was something rather short of that, John would give it, because to not try was unthinkable.

“So,” he began. “We’ll go over what happened, properly. And, you know, you’ll tell the others what happened, and they’ll learn from it, because none of us want this to happen again.”

A slight nod from Scott.

“Then you’ll make an appointment with Dr Hynes in Melbourne. She’s the best when it comes to post-traumatic counselling, and you’ll go and see her, because you need to get help to put this behind you. Which you need to do because we need you, Scott. More than ever, we need you.”

Virgil would have said something so much more insightful and inspiring. The prosaic, banal nature of his comments were apparent even to him, but it was all his brain supplied. He sensed the inadequacy, the lack, even as he acknowledged that he had nothing else to offer.

And yet, unless he was really misreading things, Scott seemed to be straightening where he sat.

That could only mean good things where Scott was concerned. He had no idea what he’d said that had helped, but it did look, even to him, as though there was some part of what he’d just said that had got through.

If he wasn’t quite so surprised, he would have been quietly pleased. 

“I hear you. I do. And you’re right.” Scott folded forward, intense and focused. “We have a situation. And the thing is – the thing is, I’ve been sitting here, working it through, going over all the angles. The only factor that I can completely rely on is me, and for the last few days even that hasn’t been true. But tonight, I think it is. I think I’m working the problem again. I think I’m thinking clearly again.”

“Well, given what has happened to – “

“No. I’ll do the counselling. John, it’s a good idea, but I know when I’m operating at my best, and if I’m a few cogs down from optimal status, well, that’s tiredness for you. But I’m capable of dealing with what we’re facing, and the fact is, I’ve got a plan.”

“You do?’ The conversation had taken a sharp turn that John had not expected. “For Hamartia?”

“Oh, yeah, for that – for her. I have a plan, and I think it will work. The only thing is…”

“What?”

Scott didn’t shake his head, or stand up, or make any kind of gesture, and yet the very lack of overt reaction made his words sound worse somehow.

“I hate every goddamn bit of it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next part finishes the story. The first chapter is written, and the whole thing has long been plotted out. I promise it won't be as long to wait!
> 
> And for truly wonderful Scott and John tense interaction, everyone should read 'Precipitate', by Heavenwards/ Prelude. In case you've missed it.


End file.
